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Rhyme, Reason, and the Meaning of Life

Joel Frohlich

    Right now, as I write this altruistic epistle, I am on drugs. I’ll remain on drugs until my hair falls out like dandelion seeds and pallor mortis licks my skin like a chalky tongue. The drug I’m on isn’t any drug you’re familiar with. The drugs you’re familiar with are designed to make crazy people even crazier.
    My name is Samuel S. Nicholson, and I want to help you. I want to help you become nothing more than an appendage of the Universe with no self-interest.
    If you’ve already heard of me, 97% of what you’ve heard about me—that I was offered a Nobel Prize in physics but declined, that I taught chemistry at a school called Princeton for fifteen years, that my Intelligence Quotient is one point lower than Steven Hawking’s Intelligence Quotient—is irrelevant.
    Here are some other things about me that are also irrelevant: my middle name, Stephen, means “crown” in Greek, I’m descended from Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president of the United States of America, and I have a third nipple.
    Now for some information about me that is relevant.
    The drug I’m on is called Sanity Syrup. I invented Sanity Syrup nine years ago, whileI was still teaching at Princeton. Up until that day, I had been a lunatic my entire life.
    You are still a lunatic.
    Sanity Syrup is a drug which, when injected into the bloodstream with a hypodermic needle, numbs those glands of the brain, such as the amygdala, which are responsible for emotion.
    Emotion is a mental illness that affects every human being on planetEarth. It causes such diseases as love, hate, anger, depression, greed, selfishness, shame, and lust.
    Emotion was originally an evolutionary adaptation for our animal ancestors, who, unlike human beings, cannot reason. Because animals cannot reason for themselves, they need emotions to guide their actions for them.
    A mother ape, for instance, cannot think, “If I do not care for my offspring, my offspring will die. If my offspring die, the ape race will die. The ape race must live on. Therefore, I must care for my offspring.”
    No. An ape is capable of no such thoughts. The mother ape cares for her offspring for one reason and one reason only: because she loves them.
    We are human beings. We are capable of such thoughts. We know that if we don’t care for our children, the human race will die out. We know that if we don’t eat, we will starve. We know that if we jump off a very high ledge, we will die.
    Etcetera.
    We are like adults still dressed in swaddling clothes. As we grow up, our swaddling clothes constrict us like a python.
    The same is true of the primordial emotions that enslave us. If we have reason, what need have we for love and hate? For fear and anger?
    None whatsoever.
#
    Incidentally, there are a few human beings on planet Earth who are no longer lunatics. They’re my patients. They came to me and allowed me to heal them with Sanity Syrup because they knew they were sick.
    Let me tell you a story about one of my patients: a young man named Sylvester Starbuck, who once was, like you, a lunatic.
    Sylvester Starbuck, like many other human beings, had a question: he wanted to discover the meaning of life. No matter how many books he read spewing useless philosophy like a professor ranting in Pig Latin, or how many erudite people he consulted so full of themselves their ego bled out every pore, he could not find the meaning of life.
    As a matter of fact, Sylvester had another question. He wondered whether or not human beings had free will.
    Sylvester first began pondering this question after he became a journalist. His first employer after he graduated from the Missouri Journalism School at the University of Missouri was the Washington Post, one of the most reputable newspapers in the country. Sylvester’s first story assignment for the Washington Post was to write an article about the mayor of Washington, D.C., Wilbert Mustaine, and the audacious new bowtie Mayor Mustaine had begun wearing since February.
    Mayor Mustaine’s new bowtie was hot pink with little white flamingos embroidered on it. It was a present from his mistress, Martha Dick, who had purchased the bowtie for 500 dollars at the Nordstrom in Tysons Corner Center Mall in Mclean, Virginia. Mustaine had worn it like a Jew wears a yarmulke ever since.
    Martha bought the bowtie for the mayor while fondly remembering her father, who always looked snazzy in any shade of pink. Martha did not realize that her father had, in fact, been an effeminate homosexual.
    The hot pink bowtie led to immutable criticisms that Mayor Mustaine’s taste in fashion was overly feminine, causing enough controversy to deserve a proper article written in one of the most reputable papers in the country, the Washington Post.
    It was Sylvester’s life-or-death assignment to get an interview with the mayor about the bowtie. Sylvester, in fact, ran across Mayor Mustaine eight times in one day trying to work up the backbone to ask him for an interview. The problem was this: while Sylvester was as loose as a floorboard in a creaky old shack around people he already knew, he became as stiff and unsocial as a mummy around people he didn’t know.
    When Mayor Mustaine crossed paths with Sylvester an eighth time that day inside a Seattle’s Best Coffee shop, he mistook Sylvester for Martha’s son, Joshua Dick.
    “Joshua!” the mayor said directly to Sylvester.
    “Y-Yes?” Sylvester replied.
    “Would you ask your mother to give me her macaroni and cheese recipe?”
    “Um.”
    “Let me tell you something Joshua: no one can make macaroni and cheese like your mother.”
    Sylvester was so confused that, for a moment, he really though his name was Joshua.
    After failing to ask for an interview with the mayor, Sylvester was disgracefully fired from his first job. A rival newspaper, the Washington Times, subsequently hired him and asked him to write a column for their sports section. Sylvester knew as much about sports as he did about Vietnamese brands of toilet paper, but agreed to take the job out of desperation.
    “Our senior sports columnist just died of food poisoning after eating sushi sold at an Aerosmith concert,” Sylvester’s interview explained. Sylvester couldn’t have remembered his interviewer’s name if you had put a ten-gauge double barrel shotgunto his temple.
    “I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Are you up to writing a sports column for us?”
    “Unquestionably,” Sylvester said.
    As part of this column, Sylvester would have to interview Michael Shortshack, a professional basketball player for the Washington Wizards. After receiving clearance to enter the Wizard’s locker room, Sylvester realized he didn’t know what Michael Shortshack looked like. Michael Shortshack might be black, white, tangerine, or terra cotta. He might be a baby, or he might be Moses. He might be a munchkin, or he might be the Statue of Liberty.
    Not only did Sylvester have no idea what Michael Shortshack looked like, but Sylvester didn’t know what position Michael Shortshack played for the Washington Wizards.
    Sylvester didn’t even know what the positions on a basketball team were.
    So, rather than asking for the interview, Sylvester ran out of the locker room sniffling like a pig dying of asthma. As he left the Verizon Center where the Wizards played, thousands of Wizards fans also leaving the Verizon Center saw Sylvester sniffling like a dying pig. One of them, Wilbert Mustaine, still thought Sylvester was his mistress’s son.
    “Joshua!” called Mayor Mustaine. “Get that recipe from your mother, will you?”
    It was following this incident that Sylvester began to doubt that he possessed so much as a metaphysical molecule of free will.
    Sylvester’s great-great-great grandfather, Richard Starbuck, had felt the same way a century and a half earlier during the Civil War, just before being hanged for desertion by the Union army. Richard had been spooked by a shrill rebel yell he heard just before the First Battle of Manassas.
    The rebel yell sounded like this: “Wa-woo-woohoo, wa-woo-woohoo!”
    When Richard heard the rebel yell, he imagined that all the demons of hell were waiting for him on the other side of the battlefield with a boiling cauldron of demonic water to cook him in if he were captured. The demons were so excited about the prospect of boiling Richard alive they were yelling “Wa-woo-woohoo, wa-woo-woohoo!”
    After Richard imagined this, he took off in the other direction like a jackrabbit being chased by the boogieman.
    Richard’s last words before being hanged were, “I didn’t want to run. My legs made me.”
#
    After being shamefully fired by the Washington Times, Sylvester went regularly to see a psychologist named Amy Oshkosh, who happened to be a very sweet lady.
    A psychologist is someone who crazy people go to see after they finally figure out they’re crazy. What the crazy person doesn’t know is that the psychologist is also crazy.
    This is why Dr. Oshkosh couldn’t help Sylvester: she was a lunatic, just like you, and just like Sylvester.
    When he visited Dr. Oshkosh, Sylvester would sit on a long, cozy chaise that faced away from Dr. Oshkosh, ergo avoiding eye contact and allowing Sylvester to overcome his social phobia of speaking with people he had never met before.
    Dr. Oshkosh would tenderly beat Sylvester over the head with an onslaught of questions about his life: questions about his phobias, about his childhood, and about his mother. After Dr. Oshkosh finished tenderly beating Sylvester over the head with questions, Sylvester would ask his own questions.
    “Dr. Oshkosh? Do you believe in free will?”
    “Absolutely,” replied Dr. Oshkosh. “I believe that every human being is responsible for his or her own actions.”
    As a matter of fact, Dr. Oshkosh had written her thesis at Boston University on the impossibility of free will.
    “Free will,” Dr. Oshkosh had concluded in her thesis paper, “is like darkness. We see it everywhere, but it does not, scientifically speaking, exist.”
    Though Dr. Oshkosh withheld this truth from Sylvester, her reply still didn’t give him much confidence. The question of free will made Sylvester so anxious that one night, while he was driving home from a job interview in Baltimore, Maryland, Sylvester decided to test his free will by attempting to swerve his Buick Lesabre into an oak tree on the side of the road at 65 miles per hour.
    Sylvester couldn’t do it. No matter how much he wanted to send a signal from his brain to his hands via the spidery motor nerves in his arms, he didn’t possess the free will to fling his Buick into the oak tree.
    This made Sylvester furious. It made him so furious that he stopped his car on the side of the road, walked back to the exact oak tree he had wanted to slam his Buck into, and began wailing at the tree like a barbarian preparing for disembowelment.
    “You’re one damn lucky tree!” Sylvester screamed at the silent trunk. “You don’t worry about free will, do you? That’s because you’re a stupid old tree! You can’t move ‘cause you’re rooted to the damn ground! Well, guess what? I can move and you can’t!”
    Sylvester stuck his tongue out at the oak tree and began skipping around it in circles, like a demented hyena dancing around a carcass.
    “I can move and you can’t! I can move and you can’t! Nanny-nanny-boo-boo!”
    Although taunting the tree made Sylvester feel a bit better, he was still incurably envious of the tree’s ignorance. He wished he, too, were a tree, so he could be ignorantly blissful. Being human wasn’t worth having legs and mobility.
    “Maybe in another life I’ll be a tree,” Sylvester sighed to himself.
#
    The next time Sylvester went to see Dr. Oshkosh, he tried her with his most sacred question.
    “Dr. Oshkosh? What is the meaning of life?”
    “I wish I could answer that question, Sylvester, but I’m a psychologist, not a philosopher.”
    “I think we should all be philosophers,” Sylvester said.
    Sylvester was particularly melancholy on this visit to Dr. Oshkosh’s office, because he had recently grown so fond of a young woman named Melanie Ostrich that every time he thought of her, his brain would release astounding amounts of testosterone, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonininto his blood stream. These chemicals caused him to feel either ridiculously giddy or ridiculously miserable, depending on whether or not he thought Melanie’s brain also released dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and estrogen every time she thought of him.
    Incidentally, Melanie’s brain released no such chemicals when she thought of Sylvester.
    Melanie Ostrich had been one of Sylvester’s classmates at the Missouri School of Journalism. Like Sylvester, she had moved to the D.C. Metropolitan Area to capture one of the countless journalistic jobs available in and around the nation’s capital.
    Melanie Ostrich is also a descendent of Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president of the United States. That makes her my fourth cousin, twice removed.
#
    When Sylvester drove to Baltimore to interview for the Baltimore Monitor, he quite literally ran into Melanie in the paper’s lobby. Because Sylvester was being stressed like a rubber band in the hands of a third grader by the importance of the interview, he had momentarily forgotten where he was. When he saw Melanie, he thought he was in a museum of memories. The memories were not real, but they appeared real because Sylvester was under so much stress he could no longer distinguish reality from imagination.
    This part of the museum was clearly an exhibit on the four years of Sylvester’s life spent at the University of Missouri. The young people in the lobby, Sylvester thought, were students, and the old people were professors.
    There were a lot of professors in the lobby. So many that some of the old men, Sylvester quickly realized, couldn’t be professors, but rather manifestations of Sylvester himself, later in life. Sylvester had—or rather, Sylvester would—return to the museum of memories again, at age 60, age 70, and age 150.
    The 150-year-old manifestation of Sylvester was so old that nothing remained to hide his soul. He was a decrepit old scarecrow. His eyes showed nothing but misery. His lips showed nothing but fear.
    “My God,” Sylvester said. “That’s me.”
    Realizing that his youth was as ephemeral as a firefly on a late July evening, Sylvester turned to the memory of Melanie and walked right up to her, as if she were his animate statue. The animate statueof Melanie was facing the opposite direction. Sylvester studied her long legs, then her plump buttocks, then her smooth drape of auburn hair, flowing down the back of her head and shoulders.
    The statue of Melanie began to walk away. Sylvester ran after the memory, running into the animate statue and accidentally knocking her over like a daffodil bent over by the wind.
    “Sylvester?” squeaked Melanie after lifting herself up and childishly turning around. Her eyes were like pools of French chocolate.
    It was at this moment that Sylvester realized Melanie was real. He also realized that the old men in the lobby were not manifestations of him later in life, but old men employed by the Baltimore Monitor.
    “I’m so sorry—” Sylvester apologized.
    “Oh my God!” Melanie laughed. “What are you doing here?”
    “Nothing important—are you alright?”
    “Are you interviewing for a job?”
    “No—I mean, yes, I am.”
    “Oh, good luck! I’m doing the same thing! Isn’t this cool? We’re both doing the same thing.”
#
    Melanie saw Sylvester again that day, as she was driving home to her Alexandria apartment from Baltimore. She noticed Sylvester alongside the road screaming at an oak tree like a savage having his hair pulled out, his Buick pulled over on the shoulder as cars often are when they breakdown.
    “Are you okay?” Melanie asked after pulling over her car and rolling down the window. Her car was an enormous lime green Hummer H2, given to her by her uncle, Billy Ostrich, who is also descended from Andrew Johnson and therefore my fourth cousin once removed.
    Vice president Dick Cheney and senator Barack Obama are actually eighth cousins. President George W. Bush and senator John Kerry are ninth cousins, twice removed. In case you were wondering, I have the incredible relationship of being your eight hundredth cousin, eleven times removed.
    Billy had given her niece the enormous lime green Hummer H2 last Christmas because it was a very safe vehicle to drive. The Ostrich family was quite concerned about safety. George Atzerodt, a conspirator with John Wilkes Booth, had almost assassinated their ancestor, Andrew Johnson, nearly one hundred and fifty years ago at Kirkwood House in Washington, D.C.
    Two years after receiving the Hummer, Melanie and her future husband would be unable to pay rent and therefore rendered homeless due to the cost of filling the Hummer up with gasoline. By then, no one would be left on planet Earth who wanted to buy a gas-sucking machine such as a Hummer. Melanie’s Hummer H2 got seven miles to the gallon, whereas the average vehicle got 27 miles to the gallon.
    The last Hummer General Motors will ever manufacturer will be called the Hummer H∞. It will get -∞ miles to the gallon, thus traveling along an axis of negative space-time into the fifth dimension, where no one ever pays for gas.
#
    From the side of the road, Sylvester called out to Melanie, “I’m fine!”
    “Having car trouble?” Melanie asked.
    “I broke down!” Sylvester replied. He wasn’t referring to his car, but Melanie misconstrued “I” to be a metonym for his car.
    “Need a ride?” Melanie asked.
    “I’d love one,” Sylvester replied. He then left the oak tree and his Buick, with the engine running on the side of the road, and climbed inside Melanie’s enormous lime green gas-sucker.
    Sylvester’s Buick Lesabre is still there, on the side of the Baltimore Washington Parkway. The engine is still running. No one has touched it.
#
    After Melanie took Sylvester home, Sylvester’s brain began generating insidious chemicals with as much power to get him high and subsequently make him miserable as cocaine or heroine.
    This phenomenon happens to many, if not all, human beings. There’s no evolutionary explanation for this phenomenon. It’s more than is necessary for the propagation of the species; it’s overkill on the same magnitude that hunting a duck with nuclear bombs is overkill.
    This illness is so strong that sometimes, human beings who didn’t previously realize they were lunatics realize they’re lunatics.
    Because there’s no evolutionary explanation for this phenomenon, it must be magic. I therefore call it chemical magic.
    After Melanie drove Sylvester home, chemical magic turned Sylvester’s brain into a mushy playhouse of Care Bears, rainbows, and unicorns. It didn’t bother him in the least that his Buick Lesabre was still sitting with its engine running on the side of the Washington Baltimore Parkway. Instead, Sylvester felt so giddy that he decided to call Melanie, who had left him with her home phone number.
    A smooth, manly voice slick as motor oil answered after two rings.
    “Hi, is Melanie there?” Sylvester asked the smooth, manly voice.
    “Sorry,” the smooth, manly voice said, “she’s out right now.”
    “Ah. And who am I speaking with?” asked Sylvester.
    “This is Melanie’s fianc�e.”
    Sylvester dropped the phone. He then picked it back up and hurdled it into the wall at 38 miles per hour. It shattered to pieces like a Lego toy.
    His brain was no longer a mushy playhouse of Care Bears, rainbows, and unicorns. It was now a murderous madhouse of Nazis, napalm, and nothingness.
    “I hate everyone!” Sylvester roared. A web of scarlet veins ran across his eyes, tears dripping from them like condensation dripping from a hotglass. “I hate life!”
    Sylvester had no more freedom than a pack mule. Emotion was smiting him with thunderbolts of insanity.
#
    Sylvester left Dr. Oshkosh’s office very disappointed the day she revealed she was not a philosopher. He knew he didn’t have a flea’s hair of free will, but he still didn’t know the meaning of life.
    I was the one who would teach Sylvester the meaning of life.
    After Sylvester left Dr. Oshkosh’s office and began to walk home, he passed me on the street outside Dr. Oshkosh’s office, handing out flyers for Sanity Syrup. I was competing for patients with another man standing not twenty feet away, Larry Fudge, a brain surgeon who performed lobotomies. He, too, was passing out flyers.
    The best place to find lunatics who actually know they’re lunatics is outside a psychologist’s office. Larry and I both know this. Statistically, seven out of eight people choose Larry’s lobotomies over my Sanity Syrup. For some reason, they think Sanity Syrup is heroin.
    They’re lunatics. I forgive them.
    When I noticed Sylvester leaving Dr. Oshkosh’s office, I licked my finger and pulled a periwinkle blue flyer out of the stack.
    “Here comes another one, Larry,” I said.
    The difference between Larry and me is that Larry is still a lunatic and I’m not. I’m still trying to interest him in some Sanity Syrup. He’s still trying to interest me in a lobotomy, which is foolish, because I’ve already been cured and even if I hadn’t been, lobotomies have a pitifully low success rate of 1 in 300,000.
    When I handed Sylvester a flyer, he took it, glanced at it briefly, and then asked me a question.
    “Do you know the meaning of life?”
    “The meaning of life,” I told Sylvester, “is to become nothing more than an appendage of the Universe with no self-interest.”
    “Is that what this is about?” Sylvester asked, nodding towards the flyer I’d just given him.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “I can’t become an appendage of the Universe with no self-interest,” Sylvester said. “I don’t even have free will.”
    “It’s true,” I said, “that you have no free will. But you can, with my help, become an appendage of the Universe with no self-interest.”
    “How?”
    “A long time ago, a man named Plato divided the human soul into three parts: Eros and Thumos—desire—and Logos, or reason.
    “As long as Eros and Thumos have control over you, you’ll never become an appendage of the Universe with no self-interest. But if Logos is your only master, then you’ll be one with the rational Universe around you.”
    I then drew a plastic bottle of Sanity Syrup from my pocket and showed it to Sylvester.
    “This will free you of Eros and Thumos,” I said.
#
    I have good news: Sylvester Starbuck is now a cured man.
    After taking him to my office just a few blocks away and before injecting him with Sanity Syrup, I gave Sylvester a pair of Bose headphones and played a song for him. It is a something I do for every patient, so I can make sure the patient is cured after the injection.
    The song I played for Sylvester was the fourth movement of Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets. The movement is named after Jupiter, the bringer of jollity.
    After the song was finished, I asked Sylvester to describe to me what he’d heard.
    “It was euphony bleeding out of violins,” Sylvester said. “It was as unbearably rich as the whole spectrum of life. It was the voice of God.”
    After an injection of 15 milliliters of Sanity Syrup into Sylvester Starbuck’s bloodstream, Sylvester fell unconscious for three hours. When he awoke, I gave him the Bose headphones one more time and asked him to listen to the song and describe it to me again.
    “I heard a large instrumental ensemble of string, brass, and woodwind instruments playing a song that began in the key of C major,” Sylvester said. “The key then progressed to D major, then dominant G.”
    Sylvester Starbuck was finally an appendage of the Universe with no self-interest.
    To misquote the words of the old Negro spiritual once correctly quoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., “Free at last! Free at last! Thank the rational Universe, we are free at last!”

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