When I was in college I went on a hiking trip in underground limestone caves in upstate New York.  Cell phones don’t work underground, and it was so wet that all electronics that weren’t waterproof had to be left behind. We used head lamps that were powered by calcium carbide, or what’s just called carbide, which is a mineral that when mixed with water produces flammable acetylene gas, and burns brightly against a reflector when ignited. It has a flint igniter similar to a Bic lighter. You bring a bag of carbide rocks along and you’ve got a light whose batteries won’t run down when you need it most. It needs only water and gravity to work.

We brought some friends from McGill University and it was a total of about 10 people. It was NOT a public tourist attraction. Getting to it involved driving to a large farm in the middle of nowhere in Schoharie County, asking the owner’s permission, getting yourself rigged up and rappelling down a couple hundred feet through a small hole in the ground covered only by an iron sewer drain cover.

Once down to the bottom, we worked our way through rocky passages for a couple hundred yards that were narrow enough to stop someone who didn’t skip dessert that day, and then into a massive cavern with hundreds of sleeping bats hanging from the ceiling. Well, not all of them were sleeping. A dozen or so were flying around, and the ones that were sleeping could wake up from a tiny rise in temperature – so it wasn’t wise to get too close to them. After resting there and taking it all in for a bit, the senior spelunkers pointed to the next phase of the journey, a small opening at the far side of the cavern through which a small stream flowed.  At the other side, they said, was a beautiful crystalline waterfall composed of stalactite formations that were millions of years in the making.

The opening was only about two feet high, so you had to crawl on hands and knees in the streambed to get there.  Since we were using those carbide-powered head lights mounted to spelunking helmets, you had to hold your head up or your light would go out. This was no small challenge.

They said it was about 400 yards away and was a tough crawl, and recommended only those who were brave and strong enough attempt it.  Since they’d already done it, they stayed back and two teams of us decided to attempt it.

I led the first team of four of us and began the arduous crawl down the streambed into the cave-within-a-cave.  At times the ceiling was down to no more than a foot and a half and my helmet scraped against it as I moved forward.  After what must have been about 300 yards I was really cold, wet and worn out, and as I paused to regain my strength my head accidentally dipped into the stream and my light went out.

The darkness in an underground cave is the darkest dark you will ever experience on planet earth.  I was a good distance ahead of the next guy behind me, and when that light went out I got to experience it first-hand.  You start seeing things that aren’t there, as your brain struggles to figure out how to adapt to the complete absence of any light whatsoever. The igniter had also gotten wet and would no longer spark, so with no way to restart my carbide lamp in the cramped quarters I let the next person behind me know, and let him squeeze past to go ahead of me as we continued on.

With only the dim flicker of that light ahead of me to go by, I crawled on with the expectation of something awesome up ahead that few people had ever experienced.  It better be worth it, I thought, this is hell getting there.

My crawl to paradise continued, until I heard the guy ahead of me say that the ceiling had completely closed down on him and there was nowhere else to go.  It was a dead end.

And it was so cramped there was no way to turn my 6’2 frame around, either.

So, with no light, soaking wet, freezing cold, and nearly exhausted, I along with the rest of the team got to crawl back out of the passage backwards.

When we got back to the cavern the senior spelunkers were having a good laugh at our expense.  “We tell all the first-timers about the crystal waterfall,” they said.  “You guys always fall for it.”

The lesson is, don’t trust the senior guys, and when the ceiling’s headed for the floor, you gotta know when to bail.

As I listened to my Mogwai and Fluke channels, I thought about a 26-year old telling me about her Lady Gaga channel the day before. “Really?” I thought to myself. You could stand at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, stare up at it and say, “No, I think I’ll stay here and have a drink from the toilet”?

The promise of Internet radio, from the moment those guys at Real figured out how to get audio to stream (barely) over a 28.8 modem in the mid-90’s, has always been to revolutionize the music industry by opening the doors to a flood of musical talent that was inaccessible through the corporate radio model, and usher in a new era of direct connections (and revenue) between musicians and their fans. Yet, here we are fifteen years later, and the music industry is a trainwreck and the Gen Ys still crave a steady diet of the basic corporate gruel. What went wrong?

I know that Pandora won’t be the same forever. I know you want your large and well-deserved payday for yourself and all the musicians who brought Pandora to life and sent broadcast radio to its ignominious death. I know the day will come when some media conglomerate will buy Pandora and you’ll retire in Bora Bora with naked nymphets in diamond-encrusted tiaras serving you drinks with paper umbrellas in them, but I know that it will also signal the end of Pandora as we know it. Someone else who is not concerned with the purity, the algorithmic perfection of the musical selection process behind Pandora, will come along instead and exploit the “Lady Gaga” effect, as I’ve decided to call it. But it will be a sad day for us all, as the beauty of what you and your loyal minions have created slowly degenerates into the pile of corporate shit it will eventually become, and the cycle of radio begins again until the next supposed revolution.

I know it’s coming, I don’t know when, and I know I can’t do much about it, but I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts. Thanks for driving the magic bus this far.

This is my list of those songs. It represents the hard-edged side of rock and neo-metal that won’t be on your pantywaist VH1 or MTV lists. You may have never even heard of some of these songs, and if this is the case then you should acquire them from your favorite music service immediately. They are composed of so much awesome that your life will be incomplete without hearing and appreciating their greatness at least once. They are the reason you need an 11 on your volume knob, and need no further explanation or justification for their place on this list. Connoisseurs need only nod their heads in silent affirmation. They are not listed in any order, and there will inevitably be some omissions – some are deliberate, some not. I’ll be adding links to excerpts I find online as time permits.

Dream Theater “Pull Me Under” 1992
Trust Company “Downfall” 1999
Saliva “Click Click Boom” 2001
Staind “Price to Play” 2003
Fuel “Won’t Back Down”
Chevelle “Send the Pain Below” 2003
Earshot “Wait” 2004
Tool:
“Sober” 1992
“Lateralus” (the whole goddamn album) 2001
“Jambi” 2006
“Vicarious” 2006
“The Pot” 2006
Van Halen:
“Poundcake” 1991
“Pleasure Dome” 1991
“Ultra Bass/Pleasure Dome/Drum Solo [Live]” 1992
“The Seventh Sign” 1994
“Baluchitherium” 1994
“Humans Being” 1997
Metallica
“Ain’t My Bitch” 1996
“Fuel” 1997
“Suicide and Redemption” 2009
Helmet “Milquetoast” 1994
Joe Satriani:
“Time”
“Flying in a Blue Dream” (Live version, 1993)
“Redshift Riders”
“Clouds Race Across the Sky”
“Mind Storm”
“Time Machine”
“Crystal Planet”
“Devil’s Slide”
“Made of Tears”
“Cool New Way”
“A Train of Angels”
Eric Johnson:
“Cliffs of Dover” 1990
“Trademark” 1990
The Crystal Method:
“Roboslut” 2006
“Wepons of Mass Distortion” 2004
“Name of the Game” 2002
“Vapor Trail” 1997
Nickelback:
“Because of You” 2003
“Figured You Out” 2003
“Burn It To The Ground” 2009
Seether “Gasoline” 2004
Kasabian “Clubfoot” 2005
Creed “My Own Prison” 1997
Deftones:
“Nightrider” 2000
“Minerva” 2003
Linkin Park “Hybrid Theory” (yeah, the whole fucking thing) 1999
“Numb”
“1stp Klosr”

And the song that spawned this whole thing, which could be nothing short of the best one of all.

Papa Roach “Lifeline” 2009

Prior to America, the most advanced civilization on earth was the Roman Empire. The Romans had either produced, or adopted and enhanced, a bewildering array of military and civilian technology over 2,000 years ago – some of which has only recently been discovered – that we now think of as being modern inventions:

• the engineering wizardry of the arch;
• the colosseum;
• sanitation technology such as baths, sewers, soap, and flush toilets;
• cranes for construction and loading ships with heavy cargo;
• concrete;
• mills, presses, pumps, reciprocating machines and farm plows;
• knives;
• maps;
• books and newspapers;
• pottery;
• roads, bridges, tunnels, and horse-drawn vehicles to traverse them;
• surgical instruments and dental implants;
• water delivery through pipes and aqueducts.

Short of electricity, this was a highly advanced society. They had even begun to harness the power of steam 2000 years ago, though they didn’t know what to do with it yet. But they were not ahead of their time. This progress should have continued unimpeded, but in the centuries of decline leading up to the eventual fall of the Roman Empire in 476 AD, relatively little technological progress occurred. And in the centuries following it, that technological progress was completely stalled – and much of it was destroyed and forgotten. Historians generally agree that there was no single cause of the fall of Rome, but the rise of Christianity was a very significant factor. And Christianity’s effects on technological progress would prove to be devastating.

With the dark ages that followed the fall of the Roman Empire and the middle ages that were dominated by the Inquisition, Christianity effectively halted all technological progress for over a thousand years. People like Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and Newton, with radical ideas about the world who were trying to advance the sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and mathematics, were arrested by Church officials and imprisoned or burned at the stake as heretics. This had a chilling effect on anyone who would question the authority of any of the knowledge of the time, like the notion that the earth was flat or that the universe revolved around us. Some scientists risked their lives and continued their research in secret, only releasing their work upon their deathbeds. Yes, it’s good that these ideas made it into the world at all, if they weren’t posthumously destroyed by the Church – but imagine how much more could have been accomplished if these great minds had been allowed to work collaboratively with each other in a free exchange of their ideas, like we take for granted today, instead of in seclusion.

It was not until the establishment of a society that chose to make its government independent from religion, and far away from the persecution of the power-crazed Christian monarchs and Inquisitors in Europe, that this progress was allowed to resume. And it promptly birthed the modern Industrial Revolution.

Imagine how much further along our technology would be if Roman progress had continued and the Industrial Revolution had occurred in the 2nd or 3rd centuries instead of the 18th. America may be plagued with Christianity, but it was not founded on it; and America would not be what it is today, if not for the freedom from it that is guaranteed by the first amendment of our Constitution.

Update, 08/2014: This idea was briefly explored in the Family Guy episode Road to the Multiverse in September 2009.

Non-natives are wondering what all the fuss is about.

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo.” Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her. Megan, a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for more than a month before he abruptly ended their friendship, telling her he had heard she was cruel.

The next day Megan committed suicide. Her family learned later that Josh never actually existed; he was created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of Megan’s.

Now Megan’s parents hope the people who made the fraudulent profile on the social networking Web site will be prosecuted, and they are seeking legal changes to safeguard children on the Internet.

If a few mean words is all it takes to get you to hang yourself, you’re at the end of a long road of problems, not the beginning of it. This is not a tragedy. Not everyone was meant to survive into adulthood. Some contestants take themselves out of the running by accident, some do it on purpose. There is no shortage of human beings on this planet, and Megan Meier did the six billion remaining survivors of humanity a small favor. Thanks Megan, from all of us. What I find vile is her parents attempting to leverage the legal system against the perpetrators of this stunt to redirect blame away from themselves and make up for their own failings as parents. Sure, I have no tolerance for bullies. But you can’t let them get to you. Nearly everyone has been teased or harrassed at some point in their childhood. It isn’t fatal, it’s part of growing up – just like touching the hot stove or falling off the bike. Normal people stick a band-aid on it and move on. If it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger. But if you are unable to cope with it, boy wait till you see what grownup life is cocked and ready to throw your way. Look at all the mean things that people like Perez Hilton have to say about our favorite celebrities. And that’s just talk. It gets a lot worse.

I’m fed up with this whiny crybaby generation of kids now being raised who have no concept of discipline, personal responsibility, or consequences. After having the dangers of the world around them safety-latched, sterilized, allergen-proofed, child-proofed and bubble-wrapped, they are completely unprepared for the dangers of the adult world. We are taking the wrong approach in making kids too safe, because it actually has the opposite effect of making them frail, fragile, and weak.

This sort of incident should be a wakeup call to the people promoting this disastrous form of child-rearing. Please, to all of you advocating legal intervention, stop expecting society and the government to make the world safer for your children. Stop expecting lawmakers to make laws to protect your children. It is a dangerous road to go down, and it’s your job anyway. We already have too many governmental intrusions into the simple act of parenting. We don’t need any more: give ’em an inch and they take a mile – kids, politicians, and law enforcement. You are responsible for your children, period. If you have too many children and cannot take an active enough role in the upbringing of each of them, do you really think that makes it not your fault when one of them goes off the deep end? It doesn’t.

This wasn’t a failure of society, and it wasn’t a failure of the legal system – it was evolutionary unsuitability, as is all suicide. We all have rough points in our lives – stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop feeling sorry for others; pick up and move on. The world does not and will not care about your sob story that people said mean things about you or that your mommy wouldn’t buy you a cell phone, purse, or Nikes. Kids will find something about you to tease no matter what you do, so you have two choices: dish it back, or suck it up.

The people that many are calling criminals didn’t necessarily do the right thing, but the fact that Megan coincidentally killed herself doesn’t make it wrong either. This type of stuff goes on all the time, it has just been elevated to this level because the consequences were unusually severe. The blame lies with Megan and her parents, and that’s it. It has become commonplace in American society to look for external sources of blame, when people need to take a look at themselves and accept responsibility for their own lives and the consequences of their own behavior. You cannot always control the things people will say to you, but you can control whether you let it bother you. Megan let it bother her and chose to end her life in the midst of her other problems. That was HER choice. Nobody forced her to do it. She will be missing out on a lot, but I don’t feel sorry for her. We all have the freedom to make these choices for ourselves, and that freedom is more important than anything else. I really don’t mind if stupid people do stupid things to themselves. Not everyone wants to be saved; not everyone should be saved.

Kids need to play rough and get hurt.
They need to fall from the tree.
I did.
If you were born before the 1980’s you did too.

Kids need to be exposed to germs and bacteria.
They need to be punished for doing bad things.
I was.
If you were born before the 1980’s you were too.

Not because it hurts them, but because it makes them stronger, smarter, better people.

Those of us born before the 1980’s survived it. This generation will too.

It is not the number of challenges we face in life, it is how we deal with each of those challenges that is the greatest measure of our own success.

Here’s a more comedic way of looking at it. Among other things, it is a profound reminder of all the reasons it is great to be alive.

Bobby Gaylor, “Suicide”

Life is a brief, beautiful, amazing thing; if you are unable to see past the challenges it presents you to appreciate its magnificence, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.