These narratives are some of the longest ones on The Doe. Check out these deep dives!

Long Reads

The year was 1986, and I wanted to record my first prank call album. I had been experimenting with phone recordings for a couple of years already; now I wanted to actually document it. The problem: I was stuck in a juvenile detention center.

My parents put me in rehab for my wild behavior and involvement with weed. And it was an indefinite program, so a kid usually only got out when the insurance funding finally reached its limit. This was one of those common 1980s teen-dehumanization places. I was tricked into coming there and was resistant to their treatment. By my second day, the staff had tackled me to the ground, held me down, ripped off my clothes—I remember I was wearing a Dead Kennedys shirt—shaved my head and put me in overalls with no shoes. 

I’m not exactly sure what lesson I was supposed to learn from that but I definitely still wanted to record my prank call album.

I hung around for a couple of weeks, got to know most of the other kids and learned how things worked at the place. But I had every intention of escaping. One other kid did too, but when the time came, he decided against it and instead wanted to commit to the program. So, I escaped by myself. 

There was an old African-American man assigned to the sleeping area to monitor us overnight. I got up around four and he was totally asleep in his chair. I jumped out of the bathroom window, 15 feet down. I still had no clothes and no shoes but that was not going to deter me.

I also had no money—or really anywhere to go—so I had to hit up anyone I knew for some assistance. I lined up a couple of places to stay and some clothes. Then, one day, a couple of weeks later, I was just walking around and—being the type of person who generally stands out—was noticed by a friend of my parents, who alerted them to my whereabouts. They all got in a pickup truck and cornered me. I took off running but they caught up to me and tackled me. They brought me back home and, after a few minutes, the police rang the doorbell. It turned out that some other neighbor had witnessed the chase and called the police to our address. After my parents explained the situation, the police ultimately drove me back to the rehab center.

This time, the rehab people insisted that I must be placed in a psychiatric hospital for a two-week observation before they would allow me back. So, I was transferred to a lockdown facility in an actual hospital. I had my own room, bathroom, a phone and a TV. I had a team of doctors checking me out. I remember their first concern was dehydration. Apparently, I had barely drunk any water in the last couple of weeks. My days at the hospital consisted of group therapy, arts and crafts class, and one-on-one counseling. It was actually pretty chill. 

The other patients were a combination of senior citizens, suicidal teens and whoever else. One elderly woman insisted that we stay in touch with each other in the future, as she enjoyed my artwork. And the hospital food was decent: I had just started a vegetarian diet, so I quickly learned about side dishes. Sometimes I picked up the phone and called random places but the environment wasn’t conducive to much chatting. The doctors seemed to feel that I needed to learn about family dynamics—and that was basically it. So I did my two weeks and was then transferred back to rehab.

As soon as I got back there, a new kid introduced himself and said, “I heard that I should talk to you about breaking out.” So, I agreed to escape with him a couple of nights later. 

 When that night came, it was a blizzard but that also was not going to deter me. We escaped through another window this time and were only a few blocks away when a police patrol car drove by. They shined their spotlight on us and yelled, “Freeze! Don’t move!” They handcuffed us and, after a brief stop at the police station, we were taken right back to rehab. It had only been a couple of hours.

This escape-and-capture routine carried on for most of the year. I was in and out of that place over and over again. The last time I actually pretended to be interested in their treatment, when, in reality, I knew I did not belong there. At all. And since they would not allow me to keep shoes, they had me on a behavioral-monitor program to earn them back. One day, I had an evaluation where they determined that I had shown improvement. They said, “Would you like your shoes back now?” I responded, “You know what, I had better not. I don’t feel as though I’ve quite earned them just yet.” They said that that was an honest and commendable attitude. But I knew that as a result, they would probably not be watching me and, late that night, I jumped right out of the bathroom window again.

This time, a friend of mine told me about a girl whose parents were in Europe all summer and that I could probably stay at her house. So, I went to a party there one night and I came right out and asked her if that was okay. She said, “Totally! You can sleep in my parents’ room.” So, I stayed there for weeks and did a lot of partying. I also managed to have some of my record collection with me. One night, I worked my way to the stereo and put on a prank call recording. I saw a house full of 100 kids immediately light up as they heard it. Also, to contribute, some nights I got on the phone and scammed a bunch of food out of local restaurants. 

During the days, I called old friends from school and did some weird prank call “rehearsing,” for lack of a better word. No recording, just trying to hear what it might sound like if I ever did make this album I wanted to make. The concept was becoming more foreign to me as this crazy time went on.

Then came the local stop for Slayer’s Reign In Blood tour. I went to the concert with a few people. Once I got there, I ran into some other friends who had recently relocated way out to rural Colorado with their parents. They told me that they had explained my situation to their folks, who then said that I could go live with them at their new place. They hadn’t known how to reach me but they knew I would be at the gig. Shortly thereafter, I was living with that family out in the sticks. It was fine, we all got along. We would hang out together at night and, during the days, I had the house to myself. So, I tried out some phone call ideas—a lot of three-way calls, in particular. 

Then, after a few weeks, the parents informed me, “We called your parents to let them know you were here and they want to meet us for dinner tomorrow night.” The next night we all went to the only restaurant in town. I was apprehensive as I went in. I hadn’t seen or talked to my folks in many months since they were adamant about institutionalizing me. Anyway, after a few minutes of awkwardness, my parents basically just insisted that I return home with them. I would finish my treatment at another location—since the first one had completely given up on me—and then I could live at home again. And, somehow, for some reason, I agreed. The path of least resistance, I suppose. I said my goodbyes and thanked that family for taking me in.

My dad drove us all the way back from that rural town and took me directly to a different rehab facility. Apparently, he had spoken to this place earlier in the day and they had agreed to create a space for me. However, when we arrived, it turned out that they had not done that. I sat in the waiting room as my dad and the staff argued back and forth about this. They said that there was no vacancy, there would be no vacancy, and they began suggesting other facilities that I could be sent to instead. Finally, after about 45 minutes of this, exasperated, my dad said, “Forget it,” and that I could just come home. We left and drove home together.

Home was now someplace new. Over the past nine months or so, my parents and sister had relocated to a new part of town—in a new house that I had never been to before. As I settled in, I had a bedroom and I had access to my folks’ cassette-based answering machine with two-way record. So I quickly began recording every phone conversation I had—although the phone recorder “beeped” every ten seconds (an early security feature, designed to alert the other party that they were being recorded). I spent a lot of time on that phone recorder and I loved the material I was getting.

However, settling into my new school was more difficult. I was way down in suburban south Denver at an enormous high school. I had some better subjects than others throughout my school day but it was lunchtime that posed a unique problem as I did not know anyone, or even what to do with myself. So, I quickly developed a lunchtime activity that kept me occupied and at least seemed harmless at the time. I stood at the payphone by the school’s entrance and placed collect calls into the main office. This meant calling the operator (which was free), having the operator call someone at the school (usually the principal or vice-principal) and having the operator ask them to accept the charges. I remember stating that I was “Dick Smack” and other absurd names. This went on for weeks, until one day when I was on the phone with the operator and the office, and in the middle of the call, the principal opened the door and saw me there. I hung up and he brought me into his office. He left me there alone for a few minutes. When he returned, he asked me, “Who sent you? Who do you work for?” I gave him my real name and explained that I was just a student. But, apparently, due to my status as a new student, there was a clerical error and I was not on file. They did not believe that I truly attended their school and called the police. Moments later, they finally did verify my enrollment and called off the cops. They then called my parents and suspended me for two weeks. 

Back at home, I went back to recording my phone work full-time. After a brief period of choosing a name for the project, I decided on Longmont Potion Castle. I just liked the way the syllables sounded together and the way that the name suggested something…else. Something distant, unfamiliar and a little odd. A few of those calls still stand out even now. Like calling a random old man and asking to speak to “Nipper” (which was the name of the dog owned by that family I was living with) and having him scream at me in response. Or pretending to be with a delivery service, along with my co-worker “Frank,” when simultaneously the guy on the other end screamed at me in response and my mom and sister returned home from the grocery store. They tried to get me to help carry groceries while this guy was losing his mind on the phone. Or trying to call this guy “Bryan” from school, who gave me his number, but the woman who answered the phone screamed that he did not live there. (It turned out he was trying to be clever and wrote his phone number down backward, unbeknownst to me.)

By 1988, my cassette-only debut album was complete. I still love it today and I more or less have followed its template ever since. If I never had made another album, I would still think of it as a success. Since then, I have made over 20 more LPC releases with a plethora of indie labels. In 2018, for the 30-year anniversary, an LPC documentary movie was released. I have been told by a number of folks that I inspired them either to create or to somehow cope with their own difficulties in life. LPC has also performed live shows both as a one-man thrash metal project and by doing live calls from a remote location. But, to this day, any time that someone mentions a movie or an album that came out in 1986, I still draw a blank. I could barely pay any attention to popular culture that year.

Pop Culture

How I Recorded the First Longmont Potion Castle Album

Criticizing Facebook is an easy game, fashionable for leftist Twitterati and red-state legislators alike. Never has there been an anti-Facebook article that didn’t have an eager audience waiting to click and retweet it on the other side. It’s an equal opportunity Rorschach punching bag. 

Of course, it must be acknowledged that Zuckerberg and company have brought much of this upon themselves: carpetbagging the entire 2016 election in favor of Trump, openly fostering foreign influence on the platform, selling its users’ data to the highest bidder, implementing a ruthless attention-extraction architecture at all costs and sowing the ground for conspiracy and institutional distrust—all while remaining seemingly indifferent to the online abuse, teenage bullying and mental health impact it fosters. They also take what appears to be a pretty laissez-faire approach to white supremacist movements and homegrown terrorist networks.

FB’s sins as a company are many, and consequently, it has become the platform everyone loves to hate. I myself was a proud, card-carrying member of that group for a long time. That is, until recently. 

After the 2016 election, I, like many others, was furious with Facebook. I felt Zuckerberg had betrayed the public trust and sold America out. He was all too eager to let foreign actors through our electoral front door as long as they had dollars in hand—or in this case, rubles. Judging by internal leaks and external public statements, Zuck seemed oblivious and indifferent to the impacts that his network was having on functioning democracies everywhere. 

But while my anger at Zuck felt righteous and deserved, I also wanted to understand what could be done about it. I felt uniquely positioned to understand the problem. I had an extensive background in postmodernism, deconstructionism and Sovietology. As an undergrad, I studied philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and evolutionary psychology. I spent time in Eastern Europe interning and working for NGOs combating Soviet influence campaigns against pro-democratic politicians and movements. And I have run a successful production company crossing psychometric data with storytelling techniques using neuroscience frameworks to maximize audience impact and content virality.  

Countries earmark budgets to combat and secure these types of networks so it is, as a general rule of thumb, foolish to think one person can wrap their head around the entirety of it. Understanding these platforms, and their problems, requires both an incredibly generalized foundational knowledge and intense specialization. 

With that in mind, I spent the last four years making this my obsession. I talked to as many experts on the subject as I could. I annoyed former and current FB employees to give me their takes. I dove deep into game-theoretical models, complexity theory and memetic transmission. I wrote papers on meme/gene coevolution and how social media platforms mirror biological ecosystems. I read all the Facebook hit pieces and disgruntled takedowns while also suffering through the puff pieces and the self-congratulatory autobiographies. And with the help of other experts, I developed the rough outskirts of what a healthier social media network could look like if implemented at scale. 

And at the end of that journey, I have netted out as cynically sympathetic towards Facebook. I now see that many of the criticisms levied against the tech giant are laced with the same naivete that we were—and still are—so right to skewer Zuckerberg for having in the first place.  

I’m not trying to defend Facebook per se, but to push back on Hollywood celebrities and public intellectuals who righteously and errantly are calling for Facebook’s dismantling. It’s an effort to highlight how complicated and dangerous of a world we now find ourselves in, with respect to social media, and how removing Facebook from the equation does little to make that world any less complicated and dangerous. In fact, it could very likely make it worse. 

It surprises me that for all the liberal epithets levied at Facebook over the past four years, TikTok’s meteoric rise to social media rock star status by the intellectual class has been viewed as almost a quaint afterthought instead of what it really is: a national security threat.

TikTok has shown us that social media monopolies are not nearly as robust and resilient as we pretend they are. To equate Facebook to Amazon and Apple is to misjudge market monopolies entirely. In the social media world, all it takes is a million teenagers egged on by a few celebrity pop stars to start a new party on a different, newer platform, and bring the lion’s share of future generations’ social exchanges with it. Any notions that assume this newer, sexier social platform will somehow behave more “ethically” are not tethered to any sort of realistic political or economic reality. 

We saw this play out compellingly with Google’s forays into China. They learned firsthand you either play by Beijing’s censorship rules or they will copy your tech, scale faster with a larger user base and take market share away either way. Google saw the writing on the wall and ultimately acquiesced to China, adding a bit of an Orwellian flavor to their old "don’t be evil” mantra. 

For as much as it is difficult to parse the intelligence and folly behind any Trump administration foreign policy directive (the “broken clock is right twice a day” doctrine), the initial intention to push back against TikTok’s gatekeepers is mostly the right one. Psychometric user data is the oil of the 21st century, with national security implications that lay far beyond the scope of what brand of jeans you like to buy online. And unlike most natural resources for which geography is the focal point for political conflict, personal data as a “precious mineral” is perpetually up for grabs in an explicitly non-geographic cyberspace. Right now it’s free for the taking by any kleptocratic or authoritarian regime with enough data scientists and engineers to pull the strings behind the scenes—no tanks and troops needed. The key point here being that it’s not what these companies and governments can do with your data today, but rather what they will be able to do with it tomorrow. 

And while Facebook’s ethical posture leaves much to be desired, their speech policy is largely mirrored after a U.S. constitutional interpretation of free speech. It’s still largely run by employees who don’t seem particularly eager to have history blame them for the downfall of liberal democracies. And as a company, it’s still largely beholden to American legislators, who, if they can get their act together, might be able to apply just the right kind of soft legislative pressure that brings about healthy reforms to the platform. So for as callously and flippantly as Zuckerberg has responded to justified public critique, it should be acknowledged that he is even responding at all. This is more than could be said for a TikTok or Huawei, whose data-extraction has a particular CCP flair to it. 

The irony then should not be lost on any of us that at the same time that Facebook has publicly committed to taking down QAnon groups, banning Holocaust deniers and outlawing anti-vaccine advertising, China is using their data-capture capabilities to round up Uighur Muslims into concentration camps and arrest Hong Kong pro-democracy dissidents for daring to speak even a single ill word against the Party. And this is the point of the "Devil You Know" game. The political distance between publicly traded companies and the government inside of the U.S. is typically defined by hostility, distance and stubborn reluctance. (See: Tim Cook planting his feet in the ground on user privacy vs. U.S. law enforcement). Conversely, in places like China and Russia, the lines drawn between business and government are superficial distinctions without a difference. When it comes to data collection, the consequences of those disparities couldn’t be starker. 

There is a global digital cold war being played out here, blending the lines between geopolitical soft-power games and legitimate nation-state spying. Judging by the blistering speed in which we brought TikTok into our homes, most Americans seem content to sleepwalk their way through it. We would be wise to pause then before throwing out Facebook in lieu of the shiny new thing, especially when that thing has a "Made in China" sticker on the back.

Liberal democracies depend on consensus-making to function. Consensus-making that is predicated upon a shared set of starting points before compromising on idealized endpoints. Those starting points are forged out of some agreement about a set of reality approximations, or what we might call “news.” If you can’t agree that up is up and down is down and two plus two equals four, then the idea of “compromise” as a political goal becomes irrelevant.

Right now, those reality approximations are constrained to three marketplaces: FB (including Instagram), Snap and Twitter, all of them acting as de facto drug cartels. They deliver a product in high demand. Each of the cartels is eager to take the rival cartel’s market share if the opportunity arises. The demand curve for their products is now fixed, the country is addicted to social media, and while we figure out how to wean ourselves off this digital drug, our attention has turned to the supply side of things. 

And so the first question we should be asking ourselves is what happens when you take out the cartel heads? If we use Mexico and Colombia and the war on drugs as analogs, what invariably happens is that rival gangs move in. Sectarian violence ensues. Territory battles spiral out of control. You have power vacuums where chaos and instability are the order of the day. (See also: Iraq, Libya, Egypt, ISIS, etc.) 

Now imagine instead of drugs being sold, it’s the stock exchange for where reality approximations are traded, the ecosystem that gives life to those starting points that liberal democracies converge upon. A fracturing of the cartel heads could very well increase the epistemic divide between dissenting parties. The ensuing power vacuum and proliferation of mini “cartels” may only increase volatility and chaos in the system instead of mitigating it. If liberal democracies depend on a sense of shared reality in order to function, it is not hyperbole to assume that a hundred different Facebooks in the system would only increase our collective political and ideological divides, not heal them. 

If this sounds all a bit theoretical and esoteric, try to envision a world where Call of Duty players, Manchester United soccer fans and Hello Kitty collectors all get their own separate news specially tailored for them. News aggregated not on a single platform (FB), but on individual platforms that never cross paths with each other, and whose only goal is to serve their users “news” that keeps them coming back to their portals. You do not need a political science Ph.D. to venture a guess as to where this all leads.

Churchill is famous for remarking, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” At heart, this is an argument about an often overlooked feature of systems design known as path-constraints. The idea that the success of a designed system has more to do with economic forces, biological constraints and the laws of physics than the execution or application of the idea itself. Said another way: There are a lot of ways to build a rocket ship that crashes and a very limited number of ways to build one that goes to the moon. 

The point here is that the biggest structural problems that social media pose to liberal democracies really don’t have anything to do with the uniqueness of Facebook per se, but rather are germane to all social media platforms, everywhere. 

The reality is that any other platform that steps into the void following Facebook’s demise is likely to encounter the same big picture meta-problems that Facebook is already struggling with currently. Reddit and Twitter have arguably navigated these waters in a more ethical way, but the problems are no less glaring and their solutions are no more elegant.

There is little doubt that had MySpace, instead of FB, risen to global dominance, we would be having similar conversations about MySpace’s platform inadequacies. Fear, outrage and sensationalism sell. All of the platforms require turnover and engagement to stay profitable. These path constraints suggest that even with the noblest of CEOs and the most ethical of corporate boards, most improvements brought about by any new “ethical” platform would only be at the margins. (Granted, these margins are still vitally important.) 

If we’re going to storm Facebook headquarters with pitchforks and torches in hand, it would be nice to know what is going to be built in its place and in what ways specifically it will be better than what exists already. In what ways are the new improvements invulnerable to the very same outcomes that awaited Facebook? In what ways can we be sure the new model won’t create an even more volatile and destructive set of unintended consequences on the back end?

And so Facebook isn’t “democracy” in the Churchillian sense. It’s just a profit-seeking firm. Moreover, many of Facebook’s missteps are ones we are right to demand civic atonement for. But we should be especially wary of those critics proclaiming that a better platform would exist if only we could just get rid of Zuck and his evil empire. We should be skeptical of those public figures on both the left and the right who are convinced that a perfect platform architecture and policy exists. How do they know what this magical solution is? Like all empty utopian promises, they promise you that we’ll figure out the details once we get there.

Science & Technology

Doe Print Value - Closeness

Media

Facebook Is Not the Problem

When you meet a gang member, your initial thoughts are liable to be negative. This type of person needs to be locked away, one might tend to think, for the safety of the community, and the protection of society as a whole. As a person who joined a gang, did drugs, committed crimes and was ultimately locked away in the name of societal protection, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that this is not the just way.

I speak for myself when I say that I made an active compromise to join the gang, in the pursuit of identity, acceptance, family and safety. I can speak for others, both in my position and not, by saying that we are all taught that approval from peers is more important than the things we dream of, or the people we love and admire. We live in a model that values power over others over innate personal ability. We forget the more vulnerable person who once dreamed and was scared in the process, almost as a defense mechanism.

I learned early on that the little boy who loved and laughed and cried was weak and could not possibly survive in the world. I walked this education out into membership, and eventually leadership, in a gang—a hardened mind, violent crimes and a worldview based on the idea that it was my gang and me against the world.

This view cost me almost 21 years of my life and not just because I was incarcerated. I did spend over two decades inside the walls of juvenile facilities, group homes, foster care facilities, jails and prisons. The actual time in these places was not the most impactful price that I paid.

The real sacrifice I made for the “power over others” mentality was that in those 21 years, I ceased to be me. I was only the person others wanted me to be. This loss of identity was pervasive and spread like a virus throughout my entire being as I got older. For much of my life, I sought approval, all the while telling myself—and fully believing—that I didn't give a fuck what other people thought of me.

The combination of traumas and angst I had experienced in my younger life created a recipe for disaster.

Patriarchy informed me that the only way I could claim a place in the world was through the false notions of superiority and power that I got from my gang identity—that these people were the only ones who had my back, and that without them I was completely unsafe in this world.

The mask of a gang member became manhood for me, but this mask was also a security blanket for a scared and hurt child, encompassing every aspect of my life. I felt safe and sheltered from harm in the short term. In the long run, however, this blanket closed the real me away, it locked me from everything valuable in life. That mask became the real prison—everything else was circumstantial.

I first got involved in a gang at 13. I was a runaway escaping a drug-addicted and abusive father, sleeping in parks, abandoned schools and behind grocery stores. I was a small and gangly kid, and while bunkered down in a dark park one night, a group of loud kids walked through and interrupted my drunken sleep. Immediately, I was struck by this group’s collective presence.

These young men had all of the things I felt I didn't have: confidence, grit, style, intimidation factor. I was a small, longhaired runaway who spent most of his life being beaten by his father and said nothing. These kids had everything he'd taken from me. They could have jumped me and things might have been different, but instead, they talked to me. Embraced me. Invited me to go with them to a show. I could have declined the invitation but, in a society where young boys are taught to admire domination and force, my clarity of choice was blunted by the more present desire of wanting these boys to like me. The thought wasn't as clear as that, but it was almost instinctual that I gravitated towards their confidence and force. Within minutes, I knew that I wanted to be just like them.

Over the next days, weeks and months, I learned their mannerisms. I picked up their style of dress, and through a series of actual fights, I was taught that to be a part of this group—and to get the respect they had—I had to be willing and able to hurt people. This seemed less terrifying than the thought of losing this newfound acceptance. I also learned that to excel, I needed to do crazy things, often violent, to gain a reputation. That way, people wouldn't want to fuck with me, and I won the added protection of having my new group in my corner when things got hectic.

What did hectic look like? It looks like attacks from others that I had been trained were my enemy—and I use the word "others" quite deliberately because everyone outside of our small group became classified as the "other." Unimportant. Not as good. Not worth anything in some cases.

Over the next few years, I found myself expelled from school, detained and continually arrested. Eventually, I was deemed undesirable by the courts and placed in a juvenile facility. After several times through this cycle, the juvenile courts determined that my house and family could not adequately manage me and, as a result, I was designated a ward of the court. Basically, that meant that the state was my new parent. I was thrown into foster care. One would think that my gang identity would end there, at the point where freedom ends and custody begins.

But inside these juvenile halls and foster care group homes, I was introduced to hundreds, even thousands of other children who had made similar choices. As a response to trauma, kids had sought protection and security in the pursuit of manhood through violence and objectification—through power over others: kids who had different skin tones, attitudes, mannerisms and gang names, but ultimately the same security blanket.

Despite the external differences, society had classified us all as "delinquent,” but what we really were was traumatized. We had responded exactly as we were socialized to, and society was afraid of the results.

I don't mean that I was never released. At 18, I was kicked out of the foster care system, but by this point had ceased to ultimately be myself. I found my way to jail, then to prison, and almost always for the gang's benefit that I still considered my family. Upon arriving at prison for my first term, I remember thinking that it really wasn't that much different than foster care and juvenile hall. I even saw some of the same faces that I knew from my years in group homes. We all wore our masks of confidence and brazenness. We all pretended like nothing affected us and hid all our other “weaker”—I would now say more real—emotions, like sadness, fear and insecurity, behind anger.

After all, anger is socially acceptable and vulnerability isn’t. In the process of learning manhood, how many of us were told that boys don’t cry? What I had become, and was seeing daily in prison, was the living result of that lesson.

We were a group of hurt people without any ability or knowledge of how to respond to that hurt in a way that healed. Sure, we did terrible things, and society had either openly or suggestively determined that we were "bad." But nothing about locking us in cages and separating us from the world was intended to treat that hurt. There was nothing to live for in that environment, so on the inside, I lived for my gang the same way that I did on the outside—with the entirety of the version of me that they had created. The gang was always all that I had, and even more so locked up.

They were the only family I could depend on.

I pushed for that gang, even when it was harmful to me, and this perspective got me a second bid with double-digit numbers. It got me into numerous riots, staff assaults and violent altercations, and gave me new cases while I was already in for an extremely lengthy period.

In every instance, I knew my reputation was growing. That fed me more than the fact that my parole date was moving further and further away. The thinking was simple: There was nothing out on the streets for me anyway. In there, and in the gang life, I was someone not to be fucked with, and therefore I was safe. Whenever I was challenged (and I was on many occasions), I responded with a degree of brutality that would get my message across: Do not fuck with me. Whether through prison political moves or actual violence, I maintained my safety.

But I was never really safe, and I was never really myself.

I could have been lost forever. I had started my second term at 21, and by 30, I had no intention or clear vision of going home. If it did happen by chance, nothing I did showed that I had any intention of staying home. The system had done what it was designed to do: create a permanent resident in its institutions. The system provided no means of treatment for my traumas, no rehabilitation method for the issues I had developed. It only gave me a number, meals and the lesson that I would always be marked as less than in society's eyes. And again, I assert: This is what the system is designed to do! The millions of other people incarcerated in America and I are not failures of the system. We are byproducts of patriarchal control and mass incarceration. 

I turned out exactly like the system meant me to.

It wasn’t some state program that saved me from myself or some benevolent staff member who made me realize my worth. No teacher or preacher singled me out and lifted me up.

This isn't a Hallmark movie. But there is a happy ending.

I eventually found healing and peace. I was able to reclaim myself. I was freed and now I live a life based on integrity and love for others. I found my salvation in the very men that I was housed with in prison, and in the real and raw connections made as we discussed why we did the things we had done.

A whole community of people, of all shapes and sizes and colors, had come together to discuss what role that patriarchy played in their lives. If this seems like an unlikely conversational topic in prison, that’s because it was. But real conversations centered around healing and discussing toxic masculinity are crucial—they’re the key to curing what has sickened society. And in doing this, I found myself again.

I also found out that what we have been taught is justice is not just at all. Justice has nothing to do with taking from me because I took from you. That revenge model stems from the same patriarchal tree as my original choice to seek acceptance and hurt others. What my peers and I did inside—and still do—is real justice. We were harmed, we openly and unabashedly discussed why we chose to harm, we found the systemic cause and we worked to uproot it. We began the process of healing, and of making society better as a whole. Justice is achieved when the behavior and the systems that led to harm are transformed for the better.

I committed to that idea in a visiting room at a remote prison, and my life transformed. I came home, but I continue to go back into prisons and hold these conversations with my peers who are still inside. I’ve broken the cycle and removed my chains. 

Justice

I Was a Gang Member and Now I’m Finally Free

I was working from home on a weekday afternoon when a friend dropped round in the hopes I'd be able to entertain her, despite the work piling up on my desk and the unanswered emails screaming in my inbox. We sat down in the living room, where I curled my legs underneath me and watched her warm her hands on the cup of coffee I’d just made her.

As I half-listened to the stream of mundane information coming out of her, I made a to-do list in my head: reply to Cathy, make notes for tomorrow’s meeting, read that student’s draft. By the time I returned to what she was saying, she was discussing marriage. Someone she worked with had recently ended their 14-year marriage after an affair. It was messy: hurt egos, kids caught in the middle and a rising financial cost.

“I’ll never get married,” I said, without a thought.

My friend blew on her still-too-hot coffee, a reminder of how slowly time was passing. “Never say never,” she said, her voice oddly casual as she dismissed me with three simple words. “You never know where you’ll be in a few years.” She seemed ignorant that she had just outlined one of the most quoted arguments against marriage: divorce.

I hadn't been raised to think of marriage as aspirational. Instead, I was raised by a single father who discouraged relationships of any kind. He built up a small world, one that was impenetrable to outsiders. We saw our extended family once a year, he never dated and he discouraged the pursuit of romance over education. Once, when I was eight years old and still unsure of my sexuality, I asked when I should have my first girlfriend. “In your twenties,” he said, “when you’re done with school.”

Through watching him, I had learned the value of independence and a particular type of working-class emotional repression that was hard to shake. I was never quite comfortable when someone else paid for dinner.

I had also grown up queer, questioning my sexuality and gender identity ruthlessly. For the first twenty-one years of my life, marriage wasn’t an option that was actually available to me. There were civil partnerships, but their perceived status, both culturally and politically, was second-class to marriage. So while my straight peers dreamed of white dresses and quaint countryside churches, I checked out. I thought about sex and exploration. I thought about my future, about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. I thought aimlessness and the fact that I floated between potential professions, unable to moor myself to anyone, was the biggest issue facing me. Marriage was never even part of my plan.

Now, in my late twenties, marriage is an ever-present specter. Mornings go by scrolling on Instagram, which is often filled with the delicate fingers of young women adorned with diamonds that could sink a ship. These women, who are often burdened with making the announcement, caption their photos “I Said Yes,” alongside an engagement ring emoji. Then there are photos of bridal fittings, wedding fairs, pink champagne, hen nights, stag parties and nuptial destinations, before the eventual walk down the aisle.

What I began to notice more and more, though, were the LGBTQ+ people engaging in this type of behavior and the way that type of content often went viral. On Twitter, I saw a video of two women at Disneyland. One pulled out a ring and got down on her knees. The other screamed and pulled a ring from her rucksack too. I read Tinder bios of men looking for “husband material.” I saw women in tuxes in front of the altar and men posing outside churches in a shower of rice. The posts, and the way they spread across the internet, spoke to just how much the culture at large wants to see queer people married.

For the better part of a decade, gay marriage was the rallying cry for the queer liberation movement: The theory held that this major legal milestone would burst the dam and give way to a flood of total equality. Then, when it finally happened in various places across the world, this hard-fought-for parity felt anticlimactic. If anything, it created another stick with which to bash nonconformists while fueling the already tense respectability politics within the LGBTQ+ community. Much like second-wave feminism, the queer liberation movement was now keenly aware of what “type” of queer best-served progress. Was it the hypersexualized gay that could be spun by right-wing pundits as perverted and predatory? Or was it the sweet innocent gay dreaming of one day getting hitched?

A month or two after that conversation, I met up with another friend for a walk. The heat was oppressive, and my back dampened with sweat with each step I took. As we caught up, I listened to her lay out her life to me—work, family, pressures and assorted stresses—until we got onto the topic of her boyfriend. She was in a long-distance relationship and struggling with isolation. The post-university shift, where everyone either goes home to reconfigure, transplants themselves to the capital or follows a job offer, had left the two of them hundreds of miles apart. The question was not only how they would navigate their current position—using FaceTime, Skype and expensive train journeys—but also their future status. Where would they settle down? My friend suggested that moving in together would most certainly lead to marriage, and she had decided she was comfortable with that. She saw it for herself and always had. She'd attended a Catholic school, after all.

"I don't think gay people should get married," I said in a tone harsher than I intended. "At least, in the political sense."

She looked at me, puzzled. “Surely, you’re joking?” she said.

Marriage was in the abstract for me. I had no long-distance boyfriend and so, annoyed that I had to consider my decision in relation to hers, I became oddly defensive.

“I’m just not sure we’ve thought it through,” I said. “It feels like all these gay people are rushing to get married, and what is marriage but a heterosexual concept, one that is built on a history of female oppression and patriarchal control? How can gay people fit within a structure that wasn’t built to include them without compromising?”

Over the past few months, I had been reading and informing myself about the politics of gay marriage. I was marching towards 27, and I realized that I would have to heavily defend my decision not to marry for the next few years. I'm the last single adult in the family; thus, I needed the ammunition.

It seemed that most people cast me as a bitter queer who was turning down something I had not yet been offered. As if, when the offer did come along, I would be grateful that someone had come to rescue me from the stew of resentment and loneliness I was broiling in. They arrogantly assumed their heteronormative predictions would prove fruitful and I would eventually succumb to their way of thinking. It didn’t seem to occur to them that my disavowal of marriage didn’t mean I would live my life alone. It didn’t mean I couldn’t be with someone for a long time, or that we couldn't draw up legal contracts regarding co-owned property or how we would split up assets if we broke up.

To them, the choice was either marriage or life as a spinster.

My friend took a deep breath and decided she wanted to move on. But I wasn’t done.

“I mean, don’t you think it’s fucked up?” I went on. “Queer people spend their adolescence being treated like shit, called names, beaten up, and then when they get older, they’re so conscious of what the straight majority thinks. So what? They get married as if to say, ‘I’m just like you, please stop hating me.’ It’s super weird.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I give no weight to conservative objections to it. Fuck them. But, I don’t know, I think it’s more complex than people realize.”

“Isn’t marriage about love?” she asked, absently, hoping this brief interlude into radical social politics was coming to an end. I didn’t know if it was worth entering into the debate around marriages as transactional and the idea of “love” being used as an institutional selling point. So we walked on.

For a long time, there has been a feminist argument against marriage, and now there is a queer one too. In her book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino posits that there is room to change the gendered implications of marriage because, in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, same-sex marriage, “reconfigured it as an institution that could be entered into on gender-equal terms.” Relying on queers to revitalize a heterosexual institution, rather than allowing them to create their own, is problematic. We're not going to come in and Queer Eye an outdated tradition by putting it in a shiny metallic bomber jacket and teaching it to love itself. That is not the path to queer liberation.

The view that LGBTQ+ people and straight people are now equal in Western society is a blurry illusion. We’re now allowed to engage in traditionally straight activities such as marriage or raising children, and while these are essential legal rights, they aren't precisely equality. They merely equate to assimilation, or the right to be treated fairly if you conform to the structures already in place. This means that LGBTQ+ people who don’t wish to enter into marriages—especially those who might be non-monogamous or in “unconventional” romantic arrangements—are judged differently and not offered the same social status who follow straight traditions.

It is no mistake that marriage offers certain legal and social advantages that no other agreement can. In that way, marriage is incentivized to gays and straights alike who seek legal security for their children, healthcare benefits and insurance payouts. But, I believe this speaks to how we should offer alternatives—a straight female friend of mine recently talked to me about how she would much rather have a civil partnership. “All the benefits without the patriarchal history,” she called it. I am inclined to agree.

The queer feminist writer Audre Lorde wrote that when trying to build the vision of your future within the confines of a racist patriarchy, "Only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable." But how does that affect queer people? Have we, as queer people, given up any hope of forming our own rules now that we have the right to abide by someone else's?

In the summer of 2018, I dated a painter for two months. At no point did we talk about marriage (why would we?), but that didn't stop the idea from percolating amongst my friends. He was, on paper, a perfect match for me. He was American, an artist, chilled-out enough to balance my neuroses and occasionally even thoughtful. To others, it seemed that I'd found my match—and that was it. I had done what every single person was supposed to do: I found a potential end to my singledom. Though, as the weeks passed by, it became increasingly clear that I was unnerved by the prospect of monogamy and the idea of lifelong commitment.

Even in the hypothetical, marriage was terrifying. It felt like I wasn’t just talking about the painter as he was, but also as he would be. Would his scatterbrained nature prove annoying in the future? Would I eventually find the weed smoking tiresome? Would we be happy together, forever, in a three-bedroom, semi-detached in the suburbs? I felt like I was having a pre-approved future forced upon me—a quasi-heterosexual life that felt like it would close in on me with its mortgages, baby clothes and shared cemetery plots.

Could I spend the rest of my life with the painter? Doubtful. Was it possible to know that after two months? No. So, why then was I going insane over lifelong compatibility? I was considering his potential through the lens of heteronormativity, subconsciously assessing our whatevership by heterosexual standards. Then, when it ended, it felt more like a failure than the two-month romp that it was. Would it have felt that way if the pressure of marriage or longevity weren’t so prevalent?

My disdain for marriage is born from a confluence of reasons, some personal and some political. Mostly, however, it comes down to the fact I’m not made for it, and it was not made for me. Yet, I am expected to want it. The idea of it makes me anxious. (While writing this essay, my right ankle broke out in a stress rash.) But it also makes me angry: angry about a lack of understanding from heterosexuals who continually promote marriage as the pinnacle, and mad that it’s me who’s expected to alter my perception, rather than them. Instead of doing their part in dismantling the heteronormative patriarchy and the systems of oppression, they ask that I, as a queer person, enter into their institution and try to galvanize it—to make it cool again as if it were a '90s tracksuit or Polaroid camera.

That day when my friend rang my doorbell as I was trying to work, I realized how little sense the whole thing makes. My friend was mourning the death of a marriage because we see marriage as success and divorce as a failure. What if, as queer people, we were able to opt out of that, and create our own systems of success and failure as we see fit? What if you happily spend 20 years of your life with someone and then break up? Is that failure? What if it were normal for people to split and move on when things became a little stale or were able to spread their wings sexually without the curtain-twitching neighbors getting curious? What if it were normal not to expect all things from one person, if society were set up to value close friendships and nurture them alongside romantic ones? Why not let queer people figure out that new vision? Let us make our own rules and not bend to someone else's.

When she finished her coffee, she stood up and made to leave. I followed her out into the hallway and slinked around her to open the door. She stood still for a moment, looking out onto the street. I wondered what she was thinking. She turned me to, hugged me briefly and headed off into the afternoon.

I sat back down at my desk, opened my inbox, and got back to work, but I couldn’t shake what she’d said. Never, I thought defiantly. Never, never, never. Never.

Collection

LGBTQ Voices

I’m Gay and I’m Against Gay Marriage

Drugs & Alcohol

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

Best of 2021

I am an American who has lived in Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood that has been making headlines recently as it has triggered protests leading to bombing and more violence in the Israel-Palestine “conflict.” 

Before moving to Jerusalem, I liked to believe that I had a neutral stance on the conflict. In my last year of studies, I was offered an internship with a UN donor agency in Jerusalem. Growing up in the States, I had always heard how amazing Israel was from my Jewish friends who did Birthright and voluntary service with the Israeli Defense Forces. I am embarrassed to admit, I moved to Jerusalem without actually studying, reading or understanding the history of the city. 

I was raised culturally Catholic, and all I knew was that Jerusalem was equally important to all the Abrahamic religions. At the time, all I really knew about Palestine was war-torn Gaza, which I thought was only in a conflict because of Hamas’s Islamic terrorist control over the territory. Israel has a right to defend itself from terrorists—that’s what we always heard in the U.S., and that is what I strongly believed. 

When I landed in Tel Aviv, my organization sent a driver to pick me up at Ben Gurion Airport. As soon as I saw him holding my name I went up to him and happily said, “Shalom,” to which he replied, “Sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew, only English. I am Palestinian.” My first thought was, how could a Palestinian be allowed inside Tel Aviv? I thought they only lived on the other side of the wall, in the West Bank or Gaza. 

I am grateful for the patience of this man, who answered all my ignorant questions on our drive to Jerusalem without any pushback or anger. He explained to me that he was born in Jerusalem, as were all his grandparents and great-grandparents, and that he had an Israeli “blue I.D.,” which gave him permission to live in Jerusalem and travel around the rest of Israel. 

“Wait, you need permission to live in the city where you and your grandparents were born?” 

“Yes, because Jerusalem is now controlled and occupied by Israel, but Israel does not recognize me as a citizen because I am not Jewish.”  

I tried to act intelligent and understanding, but I am sure my look of utter confusion was obvious. “I know, it's all so complicated and difficult to understand,” he said. “But soon you will see the truth.”

My office and home were located in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. In my first days living there, I would constantly get lost. I didn’t understand why the map had so many dotted lines surrounding my neighborhood, nor what they meant. Then I realized they marked the Green Line from the 1949 Armistice Agreement. While trying to figure it out, I learned that I was living in what was supposed to be left of Palestine’s capital. I read more—enough to understand that Jerusalem was half Israeli and half Palestinian, and that I was living and working in East Jerusalem, which is on the Palestinian side. But wasn’t the wall supposed to mark the Palestinian border? Why are there Palestinian neighborhoods on the Israeli side of the wall? I kept reading and asking.

On my first day leaving Sheikh Jarrah, I wandered onto the tram to explore Jerusalem’s Old City. I got to see a vast variety of people: Jewish men with their long beards, curls and black hats; Muslim women in hijabs and abayas; and a lot of hipster-looking youth. Among the youth, many were holding rifles, although they weren’t in uniform. As the tram filled up, I was squished into a door. A young girl came running on and accidentally hit me with her rifle. What a radical feeling, to be hit in the chest with what appeared to be an AK-47 held by an adolescent girl. I locked eyes with her in absolute shock, as I had never had a rifle so close against my body. She looked the other way and didn’t even say sorry. What the fuck was this place? 

When I finally got to the Old City, I was disappointed. I had imagined a charming, lively market, but instead came across a checkpoint with a bunch of soldiers and military cars at the entrance of Damascus Gate. There were even Israeli soldiers at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And the intimidating sights only worsened when I finally crossed the wall into the West Bank. Being raised Catholic, my whole life I had sang Christmas songs about Bethlehem. I was so excited to finally be able to see the city where Jesus was born. I took a bus from the city center of Jerusalem that dropped me off just 30 minutes away. And there it finally was: the wall.

In order to reach the Nativity Church, I had to cross the wall and go through a military checkpoint. I went through four turnstile doors, under what appeared to be a cage, just to enter the town where the Messiah was born. I had always thought of the Israel-Palestine war as a religious one between Jews and Muslims, but I never imagined it was also affecting the religious freedom of Christians. 

Later, I made the mistake of telling an airport security worker at Ben Gurion Airport that I had been to Bethlehem to visit Jesus’s birthplace, which then led to an hours-long interrogation.  

“Do you have friends in Bethlehem? Why did you go there if you knew it was in the West Bank? Did you take an Arab bus to get there?” 

“Yes, I took the Palestinian bus to get there.” That was a mistake. The officers replied angrily that there was no such thing as a Palestinian bus “because Palestine does not exist.” (That was the first of hundreds of times I heard an Israeli say that. There are, indeed, both Palestinian and Israeli buses, with differing routes.) I spoke to Arabs, because all the priests in the church were Arabs, because Bethlehem is in Palestine, and therefore there are Palestinians that are Christian and Catholic. What was wrong with that? Don’t I have the same right as a Catholic to see Jesus’s birthplace? After all, any Jewish person can get a passport to live in Israel. Why was I getting in trouble for going to see where Jesus was born?

I tried to make Israeli friends. I visited Tel Aviv frequently to escape the tension in Jerusalem. But even in the vegan restaurants and gay bars, or while smoking joints at the beach, almost every single time I was honest to an Israeli person about my humanitarian work, they were quick to brush me off as a terrorist or anti-Semite. Many taxi drivers in West Jerusalem would refuse to take me to Sheikh Jarrah because “that’s where the terrorists live.” I started to lie to them and say that I was going to a hotel near my house. 

It became more and more evident that Israel wasn’t the amazing democratic paradise the U.S. paints it as. Every week, I saw Israeli soldiers do something terrifying. The most notable was the violence against children: I once saw Girl Scouts getting pushed around by soldiers at gunpoint. 

“Why do they do this to children?” I sincerely asked Israeli people. 

“Because they throw rocks and they are dangerous.” I literally got hit in the chest by an AK-47 held by a teen, but somehow the real threat is little kids throwing pebbles? The saddest part is, these Israeli teens have to do military service or go to prison. Without proof of completing the military service, they risk not getting jobs or apartments in the future. 

I expected to see some violence against Palestinians, but I never imagined the levels and frequency of it. I saw soldiers throw cans of tear gas at a crowd in the checkpoint; the image of a mother running from the gas while covering her toddler’s face with her hijab will haunt me forever. I saw elders humiliated and insulted by 19-year-old soldiers in never-ending lines under the scorching heat, begging to enter the cities they were born in. 

But the violence wasn’t just against Palestinians: I was once riding in a UN car in the West Bank when we had stones thrown at us by Jewish settlers. These are the people living in illegal, government-funded settlements in the West Bank, on the other side of the wall, in what is technically legally supposed to be Palestinian land. They hate the UN and any organization trying to respect the original border treaties. What was the point of all these treaties and a huge wall if they want—and allow—Israeli people to live on this side? The settlers don’t have to cross the wall and checkpoints because they have their own roads that are protected by soldiers. Apartheid is the only word for it.

Although violence against humanitarian workers was shocking, it wasn’t the most shocking. What finally made me completely stop defending Israel was witnessing violence against the Orthodox Jewish community. We know that Israel was created to provide Jewish people a safe homeland after the Holocaust. We hear the words “Israelis” and “Jewish people” used interchangeably, particularly by Netanyahu himself. (Let it be known that the majority of the world's Jewish population lives outside of Israel.) We hear that Israel has a right to exist because Jewish people deserve to be safe. 

I decided to visit the neighborhood of Mea Shearim to get a closer perspective of how the Orthodox community lived. When I got there, I could hear singing and chanting. As I turned the corner, I saw a scene like something from a horror movie. Dozens of Orthodox men, with their payots (curls) and shtreimels (hats), running away from a tank that was headed towards them. The tank was hosing them down with a malodorant—the smell was so disgusting I could smell it from the end of the street. Some of the men were getting hosed so hard they were literally flying through the air, another image that haunts me until this day. I learned that the Orthodox Jews were protesting against an army draft being held in the area. They aren’t forced to do military service like other Israelis are, but there are still efforts to get them to voluntarily enlist. They didn’t have rifles like the other Israeli youth. They were singing and chanting in what was obviously a nonviolent protest, and the army came in and hosed them down with chemical skunk water. 

I learned that sadly, this is quite a frequent phenomenon. On YouTube, you can find plenty of videos of Orthodox Jews being hosed down by the IDF. It doesn’t seem to me like Israel is a safe place for all Jewish people. The state uses terrifying violence against some of the most religious Jewish people, yet I got called anti-Semitic for asking why the army harasses Palestinian children.

It is clear to see that this is not an issue merely between Jews and Muslims. This is not a complicated religious conflict. This is not a “war,” because only one side has state-of-the-art military equipment paid for by U.S. aid. This is clear apartheid, and under international law, it also constitutes war crimes. There are children being killed and arrested on land where the Israeli army has no jurisdiction. Sheikh Jarrah is not a “real estate dispute”—it is being occupied and colonized. The people of Gaza suffer more under the rule of Hamas than any Israeli person does. There are Jewish people being called anti-Semitic for standing against Israel’s right-wing government (see: Bernie Sanders). 

Israel, with its powerful lobbies, is so good at pushing its agenda—they are world leaders at spying, censoring information and promoting propaganda. They have done a fantastic job at convincing the world that if you don’t agree with their policies and violent tactics against the Palestinian people, then you are an anti-Semitic terrorist supporter. 

I wish all people could see the truth with their own eyes the way I did. This is about human rights abuses; good versus bad. And in case it wasn’t obvious from all of the videos of violence making their way out of Sheikh Jarrah and beyond, the bad guy is Israel. 

Insiders

I Lived in Sheikh Jarrah; What I Saw There Shocked Me

PortionoftheCure: As the world began grinding to a halt at the beginning of the year, solutions seemed ineffective and distant. I consider myself more fortunate than most as COVID-19 is the first real life-altering event that has affected me as a young adult. Watching the future unfold, I wanted to be a part of it—not to bore my grandchildren with stories, but to know I made the conscious decision to help it. My impact is yet to be determined, but I sleep more easily knowing I am one of many who placed their health in the hands of the hardworking men and women in the scientific and health community.

Which is to say, on a whim, I signed up for a COVID-19 vaccination through a series of applications I found on Reddit. I didn't actually expect to be contacted—I’m a white male in his late 20s with no special heritage, conditions or dependents. But to my surprise, I was quickly contacted and asked to sign up for the AZZ1222 trial through MedPharmics. It was a two-year study with the first visit lasting three hours. The company had an office and lab in the hospital complex ten miles away and actually had an opening that same day. I requested the next day to consider my answer, particularly due to the suddenness and anxiety of straying more than two miles from home for the first time in ten months.

Denny1980: This was supposed to be the first year of the rest of my life. 

The beginning of 2020 marked the ending of a four-year-long career change from investment banking into medicine. I graduated from a Physician Associate (PA) program in December 2019 and accepted a position in orthopedic surgery in New York City shortly before Christmas. I moved to New York in mid-February and was excited about my future, more than I ever had been in the past. I was a new grad beginning a new career that I loved and I was moving to a city where I always wanted to live. Then COVID-19 hit full-force. 

I guess 2020 wasn’t my year, or anyone else’s for that matter. I’ve never been known to have good timing. 

Within a month of moving, the pandemic caused NYC hospitals to become overrun with critically ill patients, triggering a citywide—then countrywide—shutdown. My orthopedic surgery training came to a grinding halt by mid-March (two weeks after I started) when all elective surgeries were canceled. Shortly afterward—almost overnight—my orthopedic surgery specialty hospital turned into a COVID-19 overflow hospital, and it remained so for most of the summer. It was remarkable to see this transformation occur. I, along with everyone else at my hospital, was proud to fulfill my duty as a clinician to help ease the burden on other NYC hospitals and take care of people who needed it the most. 

Right from the start of this pandemic, a common topic of conversation with colleagues was the development of a vaccine. “This vaccine can’t come soon enough,” I kept hearing. “Things will get better once they develop a vaccine.” Now, writing this article in mid-December, the first doses of the Pfizer vaccine were administered two days prior. It was such a relief to hear this news and also incredibly exciting. This might be the first time that members of the scientific community were heralded as heroes for coming to everyone’s rescue with an injection that will hopefully save thousands, if not millions, of lives. They deserve our praise and gratitude. 

PortionoftheCure: The morning after agreeing to the trial, I strolled into the office. As a southern Mississippian, I can vouch we have the nicest, sweetest receptionists and nurses. The lady I previously spoke with signed me in. I was given the standard information sheet to fill out (they asked for an out-of-state emergency contact, in case of evacuation). I was then given a 26-page read for my consent that covered research on the vaccine—how a double-blind study works, what symptoms to expect, the risks involved and the schedule for the trial for the next two years. Like most medical trials, financial compensation was offered, though I would have agreed to testing the vaccine without it. 

I had a 66 percent chance of receiving the vaccine, but neither I nor my nurse would know unless I developed severe symptoms and was tested. I would get the injection that day and return for my booster shot a month later, along with sporadic visits after that. A lighter set of reading material explained how my private information would be coded to protect my identity, and it gave me the option to let my DNA be stored for future research. Once I read over everything, I was called back to see a nurse, who went over the same material. The thorough process took over an hour. After nodding “yes” to lawyer-speak, nurses took my weight, tested my oxygen and blood pressure, and then poked for a few vials of blood. That was 90 percent of the visit. 

Denny1980: My hospital notified us that the vaccine would be administered to employees starting on December 14. Administrators explained that it would be given out on a rolling basis, and we should look out for emails about scheduling an appointment to receive it. Shortly after, I was ecstatic to find out I was selected to be in the first wave of vaccinations. I signed up immediately to receive mine at 2:45 p.m. on December 15. It was a surreal experience and the anticipation of receiving it was a total through-the-roof experience. 

When I arrived in the room at my appointment time, I was greeted by a nurse sitting at a table. She had me fill out a questionnaire about my health history and my reactions to medicines and vaccines. Once I was officially cleared, I was brought to a cubicle and asked to sit and wait for a few minutes. Apparently, each vial of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine contains enough vaccine for about five people. Once they have five people ready for the injection, the frozen vial is thawed, and then the nursing staff must administer it within a few minutes before it becomes ineffective. 

PortionoftheCure: The moment arrived. Another nurse came in and gave me a shot (it had a 33 percent chance of being a placebo) and that was it! I sat out in the lobby with an observer for 15 minutes, who made sure I didn't have an extreme reaction, and was told to contact them only if I had severe symptoms. Otherwise, they would call me and check-in a week later.

Denny1980: Quick administration is critical, but the vaccine was given out the same way any shot is. I was asked which arm I wanted to use, then the nurse took an alcohol swab and cleaned my arm. Then I saw it—a syringe with a clear liquid inside, a syringe I’ve been waiting to see since mid-March. I was almost star-struck. The nurse injected me, and it was done—the first of two vaccine doses was inside my body and I felt like a rock star. I was asked to wait for about 20 minutes to make sure I didn’t have any anaphylactic reactions. Then, I was on my way.

PortionoftheCure: I left the office around noon. I went home, exercised, ate lunch and took a nap. When I awoke at 4 p.m., I knew something was off. I had fallen asleep without an air conditioner in the middle of a Mississippi afternoon and I was freezing. I checked my temperature, which read 101.5. Well, probably not the placebo then, eh? 

As someone who has worked in the hospitality business, I learned long ago how to dodge most of the infected people spewing colds everywhere. This was the first time I’d felt sick outside of congestion in years. Instantly, I regretted signing up for the trial.

The regret passed pretty quickly. I was home, safe, with clean water and the internet. I could ride this out, as others had done before me. I shivered in my miserable comfort, drinking water and trying to nap until my fever broke about 12 hours later. Throughout this fever, the injection site on my arm became very sore, and the ache spread to the rest of my body, which included a headache that became splitting when I moved my eyes. I laid in bed for about three days, getting up to eat some fruit and use the restroom. My immune system kicked my butt. But by the fourth day, I felt completely normal, aside from a slight ache persisting around the injection site. A few days later, MedPharmics gave me a call and a representative expressed her sympathy for my discomfort. She told me if I had any questions or concerns, they were available 24/7.

Denny1980: About five hours after receiving the injection, I took a photo of the CDC card showing proof of my vaccination and posted it on both Instagram and Facebook with the caption, “First of two COVID vaccines received and I feel fine!” More than 24 hours after receiving it, I am happy to report I still feel fine. I do have some very minor soreness at the injection site, but I only feel discomfort if I press in that area. There is no redness, no swelling. I never felt dizzy or ill in any way. I know I am one data point out of many thousands, but my condition, more than 24 hours after administration, is in-line with how the vast majority of people have felt in Pfizer’s clinical trials.

PortionoftheCure: Two weeks from now, I will go in to get my booster shot, which will be a much quicker ordeal than the first visit since all my forms are signed and lab work is done. I’m glad I received it. As the multiple vaccines roll out into the public, it will be interesting to see which is the safest and most efficacious. Here's to fighting the good fight, and doing what you can to contribute to humanity’s battle against things that threaten our lives and the fabric of society.

Denny1980: I will receive a booster shot three weeks from my injection. My hospital is not going to make this vaccine mandatory. Nor should they. I respect people’s decisions to put off receiving the vaccine until more data is collected. I even respect people’s decision to never to receive it. The method of making this vaccine is revolutionary. Thankfully, most people will choose to take it, which will help put this pandemic behind us. 

If you decide to pass on the vaccine, please don’t let it be because you’re afraid of the side effects. It is safe. Very safe. 

The mainstream news media—CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post—will undoubtedly report quite a bit about bad reactions to the vaccine. Sensationalism sells and the vaccine is the number one trending topic right now. Just this morning I saw a major news organization report that people should be on the lookout for Bell’s Palsy as a possible side effect. This is not newsworthy, in my opinion. It’s clickbait and absurd sensationalism. According to Pfizer’s clinical trial, only four out of 44,000 people reported facial paralysis, a number so insignificant it’s not even worth mentioning. 

Always remember: Sensationalism and fear get people to read and watch the news. I promise there will be lots more of this in the near future. 

For what it’s worth, more than 24 hours after receiving this vaccine, I still feel fine, and so do the vast majority of people who have already received it. 

Coronavirus

I Received the COVID-19 Vaccine; Here's What To Expect

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.” – The Mad Hatter, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Ever wanted to know what happens when you combine 40mg of Adderall, six grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms and a menagerie of stiff cocktails together? Well, I can tell you. The answer is a hallucinogenic experience so jarring that watching the movie Inception two years after the fact resulted in convulsive PTSD flashbacks severe enough to require medical sedation. It is one thing to conceptually identify with a man wandering a barren landscape lost in time. It’s entirely another thing to emotionally relate to it. To feel it in your nerve endings. To physically know what it is to be trapped in a brain box for what feels like seven years only to find out that barely seven hours has passed.

Don’t worry. This article isn’t going to be about the musings of some guru spiritual hipster extolling the virtues and prophetic wisdoms they brought back from that “one time at Burning Man.” In fact, the only thing more traumatizing than a hallucinogenic trip like the one I experienced is to have to sit and listen through someone else tell you about theirs. The point is, I was incredibly lucky I didn't permanently scramble my cerebral eggs. To hear a neurologist describe it to me, it was as if I put my consciousness in fifth gear overdrive and full speed reverse at the same time, essentially splitting the hemispheres of my brain in two. 

There is perhaps one keen insight about systems problems to be gleaned from this experience though. Or rather, a framing device or metaphor to help us rethink how we view our conceptual landscape and the problems we face as a nation and a globe. 

My argument in this essay is that we are confusing systems problems from conceptual, epistemic problems. Adderall problems and acid problems. And that if you ever want to have a shot at solving the big system's problems like climate change, you gotta make sure you aren’t in the middle of a societal acid trip. 

To explain, I need to unpack some physics first.

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