Sometime in the summer of 1976 or 1977 I went to the county fair and encountered a Christian booth that was giving away Jack T. Chick tracts. I was immediately taken by what I was seeing. I hadn’t really read comic books as a child, with the exception of MAD magazine, which is not really a comic book anyway. I probably read Archie or Richie Rich a handful of times.

Chick’s version of Christianity was vastly more hardcore than the mild-mannered Lutheran religion that I had been exposed to. Yet it was so much more emotionally compelling than what I was exposed to in Sunday school that I read every Jack T. Chick tract I could get my hands on! At one point I think I mail ordered a huge compilation pack that included most or all of the issues that were in print at the time.

One tract in particular stuck out: Big Daddy. This was a rather infamous creationist manifesto, a direct and ruthless attack on the theory of evolution by natural selection. My religious thinking was beginning to come to a head with me sometime in about my junior year of high school. I remember taking a biology class that included a section on evolution, and the instructor had to spend the first part of the class simply addressing the negative creationist feedback he had received over the years.

But several things were in my favor, as far as the search for the truth goes. One was that the biology class set things out in an orderly progression, where one piece of evidence logically flowed to another piece of evidence. In contrast, Chick’s manifesto was a scattershot hodge-podge of criticisms, not a logically coherent theory.

I remember having a sort of teenage epiphany walking home to lunch one day with my friend John. I was talking about evolution and the biology class. John had known me since early grade school and was rather shocked to hear me express doubts about evolution.

“Matt, you’re a scientific kind of guy, what are you doing believing in all this creationist nonsense?’

Indeed, one of the saving graces of this period was that I had discovered the non-fiction books of Isaac Asimov. I don’t know what essay it was, but I had a genuine epiphany when I discovered Asimov’s treatment of the second law of thermodynamics. Asimov pointed out the great flaw in the creationist’s argument regarding the second law; the earth is not a closed system, and the second law only applies to closed systems. At this point I knew that Chick was full of shit, but the implications were deeper still, and this is why this episode rose to the level of epiphany for me.

The family I grew up in never “joshed” each other, or “told stories” or even “pulled your leg.” If this sounds rather emotionally rigid, you would be right. Obviously my friends didn’t adhere to this same kind of standard, and I believe the development of my “bullshit detector” was rather stunted. Even as an adult, I look back with sadness at how many times people have lied to me and gotten away with it, at least for a time. Again, I’m talking about the intuitive level, not the above board critical thinking level. I believe that critical thinking is like typing, it’s not a skill that one is naturally born with, it’s something you have to work at and develop.

So believe it or not, having a huge emotional infatuation with the tracts of Jack T. Chick then realizing that he was totally full of shit about evolution, made a huge impact on me. How could there be people in this world who spent their entire lives spouting nonsense and lies? How could there be people in this world who wouldn’t change their beliefs when exposed to strong evidence or logical argument?

Obviously the older I got, the more I realized that the world is absolutely chock full of liars, con men, frauds, and bullshiters of every kind!

I became a complete atheist by reading a rather odd pair of books. The first was the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. Bierce’s book was an anthology of biting aphorisms, often quite blasphemous. But one theme that was constant in his book was that there are, and have been, many religions in the history of humankind, each of them believing itself to be the One True Religion. Simple logic dictates that they can’t all be right, and in fact most of them must be wrong because they all contradict each other. This is a simple concept, but it made a big impact on me.

Eventually I read Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell. This was the first time I learned that various logical arguments had been proposed for the existence of God. The argument from first cause, the argument from design, etc. Russell systematically demonstrated that all of these arguments are fallacious. Russell’s book was also a valuable exposure to the nature of logic expressed in a linguistic fashion as opposed to the mathematical proofs of geometry that I was familiar with.

So by the time I started college in 1980, Jack T. Chick was an embarrassing episode in my mental development, kind of like admitting you liked some really bad music for a certain time period…

Only recently did I even start thinking about Chick again as a result of becoming interested in “underground” comics in general. I became a fan quite late in the game, largely as a result of Denny Eichhorn giving me a whole set of his Real Stuff comics, and seeing the documentary Crumb. Just a few years ago, Fantagraphics opened a retail store in Georgetown, which is literally just over the hill from where I live. Through Fantagraphics I was reacquainted with Jim Blanchard, an amazing cartoonist and graphic artist in his own right. I had actually met Blanchard in the late 1980’s when I came into a Kinko’s that he was working at. I allowed him to keep some copies of some photographic portraits I brought in. He eventually re-drew and incorporated some of them into his graphic compilations.

During Super Bowl Sunday, 2010, Jim was kind enough to loan me a rare parody-documentary tract called “The Imp” which was a rather scathing criticism of Chick. Unknown to me, during the 1980’s Chick had become associated with other individuals with beliefs just as far-out as his, and he integrated their stories into his own tracts. Blanchard also gave me a copy of a fantastic video documentary on Chick that included interviews with at least two people I was familiar with.

Chick is an enigma; obviously he’s not in the same aesthetic niche as Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, or any other “underground” comic artist. You won’t find his tracts for sale at Fantagraphics, nor even many Christian bookstores. According to the documentary, Canada considers Chick’s comics “Hate Literature!”

I’m sure I’m not alone in being one of those people who was affected in some weird and possibly profound way by Jack T. Chick. I think I’ll start asking people for their own stories…

Steve and I graduated from Hellgate High in Missoula, MT in 1980. Back then I was pals with Steve to some degree. He formed Montana’s first punk band called Just Ducky. Their first public performance was at a bar downtown called the Forum. Steve asked me to project a movie I had made using the “direct stock” method, which involves creating images on the exposed film itself, rather than using a camera. The most well known film maker that used this method was Stan Brakhage.

Steve was also a columnist for the school newspaper, called the “Lance”. I think his column was called “Paparazzi” which was my first exposure to that word. I knew several other people on the Lance staff as well.

In a high school the size of Hellgate, it wasn’t entirely unusual for a student to die during the school year. During my senior year of 1979-1980, not only did one student die early in the school year, but a second one did as well! Unknown to me at the time, Steve Albini and several other members of the Lance staff organized a morbid “dead pool” into which each member put in five dollars. Each member of the dead pool then picked a week of the remainder of the year. If a third student died during that week then the “winner” would collect the money. If no one died, the staff would use the money to buy pizza at the end of the year.

But word quickly got out about the dead pool, and it was immediately dissolved. I remember watching a student who knew one of the deceased students confront Albini and physically threaten him. I suspect that if it came to blows, Steve would have gotten the worst of it, as he was no great shakes as a physical specimen… But that never happened, and as the school year went on, this little scandal was forgotten about.

But tragedy struck a day or two before graduation, as one of the most popular students in school was killed in a high speed automobile collision. This kid was not only a star athlete, but a top-notch student, and all around well liked guy. During the graduation ceremony we had the obligatory moment of silence for him, though if memory serves, they were quite blatant about having everyone pray for the kid.

Later that summer, I got to talking with another student who had been on the Lance staff, Steve D. Steve D. and I were fairly good friends until he became a born again Christian and I lost touch with him. I had forgotten about the connection between Albini’s dead pool and the death of the well-liked athlete. I asked Steve if he participated in the dead pool, and he sheepishly admitted that he had. I asked him which week he picked and he was quite chagrined to admit that he had picked the week that the popular athlete died!

I always wondered if he considered having participated in the dead pool a sin, and asked Jesus to forgive him…

So I was told that the gift of the Hudson Bay blanket was a Very Valuable Thing, a thing of such value that one must be given to my brother AND me so as not to demonstrate overt favoritism. At least that was my interpretation of why my mother made such a big deal of giving one to each of us…

My mother told me that my brother had once written an essay for school on the venerable history of the Hudson Bay blanket, and may have even delivered it as an oral presentation. Clearly there was some serious mojo going on with this blanket.

But deep down, I never quite “got it”. The thing looked cool, all white with the boldly colored stripes, but it was made of wool, and as such was all scratchy. It didn’t seem substantially warmer than other blankets, especially the down comforter I had, encased though it was in an ugly brown satin. I also had a blanket my mother called a “thermal” blanket. There was something odd about this blanket, in that it was crocheted or woven in a manner that produced a myriad of holes. Even as a child, my nascent skepticism was aroused; weren’t all blankets “thermal” blankets? Wasn’t holding heat the idea in the first place? And why should a blanket be full of holes?

But Western Montana is a cold place, and I was grateful to have lots of blankets. I would arrange the layers so the Venerable Hudson Bay Blanket would be somewhere in the middle, so it wouldn’t scratch me.

By the time I got to college, I began to go through a sort of ascetic phase. I gave away many of the things I owned, and at one point I started to eat a lot less. At the time, I think I was trying to impress my first so-called girlfriend with how much will-power or self control I could exert. I call her my “so-called” girlfriend, because she refused to have sex. Yup, her refusal was a gigantic ego-shattering, self-esteem destroying, frustrating mind-fuck.

But eventually I came to my senses, and began running into women who liked to, you know, “get it on”… One night I was by myself at the Top Hat bar in Missoula, probably watching yet another R&B boogie band cover “Mustang Sally”. In walks Christy. Christy worked at the Kinko’s where I did all my photocopying. She was older than me, one of Missoula’s classic old-school radical feminists. I’m not sure exactly how she perceived me; she helped me photocopy a great deal of information I had gathered on autoerotic asphyxia, and even bound it all together for me into one large binder. This was the binder that I later loaned to Rick Linklater. I think she may have perceived me as some sort of “new wave” guy, some sort of unexpected by-product of what the hippies begat.

She walked up to me and hugged me. These days, that’s a benign greeting, and certainly not always one with sexual overtones. But to me, at that time and in that place, it could only mean one thing: She liked me and I must pursue her sexually!

So I did. We walked and talked, and of course I tried to ply her with alcohol. She seemed fearful of beer, on the grounds that it had yeast in it. Yeast was bad, somehow. I tried to explain to her that commercial American beers were both filtered and pasteurized, and so had little or no live yeast remaining. But this was really my introduction to the fact that she had a whole slew of “new age” and pseudoscientific beliefs. She claimed to have “allergies” yet wouldn’t accept that true allergies are a histaminic response, not the sort of generalized malaise she complained of. She was a believer in astrology.

Eventually we had sex. The first time was awkward and not very fun. But this created a History between us, and for her History was political. All the psycho-social ramifications and implications of this political act had to be discussed ad nauseam. But Christy was a smart gal, and in general I liked her company. Many of the women I met who were my own age were vapid and shallow airheads, and I knew deep down I could never relate to them. But I was beginning to see the weird angry-hippie-feminist side of Christy as well. I remember her telling me about how human society began as a Golden Era, run by women, and called the “Matriarchy”. But then evil men took over, and society became a “Patriarchy”.

This was news to me, as I had always assumed men had pretty much oppressed women from the get-go, and that things had gotten better for women rather late in human history, mostly in the industrialized countries. But I had come from a hard science background, so the concepts of “Matriarchy” and “Patriarchy” were completely novel to me. I had no easily accessible resources with which to investigate her claims.

Certain more tangible things began to get on my nerves. She boasted of once having destroyed a man’s Aerosmith LP because it contained the lyrics “You can’t catch me, ‘cause the rabbit done died”. But rabidly horny guys will put up with all kinds of things, and I was a rabidly horny guy. So we had sex a second time. This time things were better planned, and it proved to be the first time I ever saw a diaphragm. It looked pretty cool, actually, and of course I wondered how it might fly if thrown like a Frisbee…

So we start going at it. At this point in my life I think I’d had sex only about 5 times, so I still quite the n00b. I don’t remember how long I lasted before I came. But surprisingly, my erection didn’t go down! This was a bit of a surprise, so I just kept on going. This time around some sort of weird equilibrium was achieved, and as it happened I didn’t stop until the sun came up. I think we had been going at it for 5 or 6 hours. Alas, I was only able to pull off that stunt the one time, but it reminded me of all those old blues songs that included lines about “all night long”. Hmmm, I guess it really was possible…

By the way, for those reading this in 2009, this occurred in the 1980’s, long before phosphodiesterase inhibitor drugs were available. Indeed, no drugs or freaky devices were involved, other than probably just some alcohol.

Being that Christy worked at Kinko’s, she wasn’t a wealthy person. At one point she complained that her house was cold. I offered her a blanket, which she accepted. Since her primary need was simply warmth, I decided to give her my Hudson Bay blanket. This act had a two-fold fallout. My mother was aghast that I had given away what was to her almost a family heirloom. I found this attitude strange, as it seemed to be directly at odds with her Christian religion, which ostensibly placed a high value on charity. I refused to confront my mother with this contradiction, as by this time I took great pains to avoid arguments and confrontations with my mother.

I was not entirely surprised that the radical leftist recipient of this gift had even less understanding of its material value than I did. Back in the 80’s I had no easy way of finding out how much such a blanket might really cost. But a quick Google search tells me that buying one today might set me back $300! I’m sure it didn’t cost my mother that much when she bought it, but I don’t disbelieve her claim that it was expensive.

The final straw with Christy and me came while we were eating ice cream. We started talking about the SLA, and Christy began to deliver an impassioned screed about how bank robbery really wasn’t such a heinous crime! This was a mind-blowing assertion, as I had come from such a completely different moral background. My father had been the assistant Attorney General for the state of Montana. He was largely responsible for re-writing Montana’s state constitution in 1972. He taught law at the University of Montana starting in 1965 until his semi-retirement in the early 1990’s. My law-and-order upbringing was directly at odds with Christy’s radical leanings.

After that I’d see Christy around Missoula from time to time, but it was all over between us.

Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to that damn blanket…

Growing up as I did in the 1970’s, trick-or-treating by children was a tradition as deeply ingrained as celebrating Christmas with gift giving. Back then we didn’t have our parents escorting us from door to door.

Of course by the time we reached about 10 or 11, we became too old to go trick-or-treating. Certain adults would even scold us as when we rang their doorbell: “Aren’t you a little old to be doing this?” A total buzz kill for a child of that age…

Even as children, we would hear stories about “razor blades in apples”, but we were never given apples as treats. The worst “treats” we ever got were Bible tracts… Even in the early 1970’s everything edible was packaged candy anyway.

But by the late 1970’s, and certainly into the early 1980’s, the American cultural tradition of door to door trick-or-treating was on the wane. Over time, the idea that psychopaths were afoot, randomly poisoning or dangerously tampering with candy was taken more seriously. Back then, I had no reason to doubt this, as frankly I had no informational resources to fall back on. There was no World Wide Web, and I didn’t know how to do any kind of sophisticated search in the library.

Perhaps it was through one of Brunvand’s books, or through a newspaper story, that I encountered a rather radical notion; namely that the Halloween Psychopath was a myth! By 1985 I had learned of the Index Medicus, undoubtedly through pharmacy school. I remember using the resources of the Mansfield library, and probably the Index Medicus, to find a citation for a study published in a sociology journal about this topic.

Luckily, the library had the specific journal on the shelves, and I didn’t have to request a photocopy through interlibrary loan. It was just like the Internet, immediate gratification!

The study design was simple and elegant. The researchers assumed that a heinous act like the random poisoning of a child with Halloween candy would become news, at least local news. Surely if the Halloween Psychopath was real, some newspaper would have a story about it! The researchers went into the archives for, I believe, three newspapers; the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and a major Chicago newspaper. They carefully examined the issues of November 1, 2, and 3 for a period of something like 30 years prior to the publication of their study.

And what did they find? NOTHING! Zero, zip, nada! The only case on file in these newspaper archives was where a disgruntled adult had singled out a particular child to harm, hoping that the assailant wouldn’t be identified due to the number of people having given the child candy. But the assailant was eventually identified; he was a relative of the child, NOT a Random Psychopath.

I came from a “hard science” background so it was good to see that sound scientific methodology could be applied to the less-rigorous field of sociology. It was fascinating to me that such an esoteric subject would be investigated, and that a widespread belief was rather definitively shown to be bullshit!

I remember coming home for lunch to my parent’s house that day. I remember rather triumphantly announcing what I had just read. I figured my parents would share my enthusiasm at science having triumphed over urban mythology. My father seemed to be unmoved by this finding. He taught law at the University of Montana, and sensational subjects never seemed to interest him, especially those dealing with “fringe” or even popular culture.

My mother on the other hand had a rather different reaction. I had spent several minutes explaining the historical context of the Halloween Psychopath belief, my amazement that there existed genuine science on the subject, the nature of the test design, and the surprising result. After all that she exclaimed; “yes, but that really did happen”.

It was a sad sort of semi-epiphany for me, like learning that someone you know or like is a creationist, or believes in the divinity of the Shroud of Turin. I knew for years that my mother was irrational, but as I grew older and my critical thinking and research skills sharpened, it became all the more painful for me to witness her displays of intellectual nonsense.

No, the real danger for trick-or-treating children is being hit by a car, not receiving poisoned or adulterated candy. When I was a child, we would practically sprint from house to house in a mad dash to get as much candy as we possibly could. An obvious set-up for carelessly running across the street. So I guess that today’s modern tradition of parents escorting their kids is a good thing, if for no other reason than they can make sure their kids cross the street safely.

Note that I’m writing about events from almost 25 years ago strictly from memory. For a more much more updated and fact-checked take on the same subject, read Ben Radford’s excellent essay.

Unfortunately one of the defining characteristics for both my brother and me was that we were “uptight”. My brother had it much worse than I did, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reverse the bad programming that makes me “uptight”. I see the same pattern in a lot of clever people; the same mental talents that are expressed in strong verbal skills are tied in with anxiety. If you begin to define yourself as different from, or superior to, other human beings due to verbal skills, then your life becomes a constant struggle to maintain this self-imagined superiority. I think this struggle was at the root of the anxiety that infected my brother and me.

My brother had other demons. He was most likely a heavily closeted homosexual. This is understandably a strong claim, and one I don’t make lightly. He never married, nor ever had any girlfriends or female dates, as far as I know. As clearly as I can remember, only three friends of his ever come over to our house. I know for a fact that two of them were gay. One of them, Tracy, became wealthy through ownership of Missoula and Portland porn stores.

I always liked Tracy, and ran into him in Seattle some years back. I even visited him in Portland somewhere in the late 1980’s. I asked Tracy if he ever had any sexual contact with my brother and he told me he did not. I believe him. This suggested to me that my brother was attracted to gay men, but was unwilling to follow through.

My brother never developed any of the stereotypical Montana hobbies such as hunting, fishing, hiking, or skiing. His aesthetic tastes ran to the French language and gourmet cooking. He would speak privately to my mother in the stereotypically “gay male” manner, yet with everyone else it was rigid, clipped, and over-enunciated.

Now at this juncture, lest I be accused of being insensitive to gays, let me state flat out that I have no problem with anyone being gay, my brother included. I suspect that if my brother could have come to terms with his own sexuality, he would have been a much happier person. Why was he unable to come out?

Probably because he was a hard-core Christian.

When one thinks of hard-core Christians, one usually thinks of fundamentalists. Strangely my brother was actually a Lutheran… As well as his religion, most of his social life revolved around his church activities.

I started out as a Lutheran myself, but I was always lukewarm. I attended Sunday school, but never studied the Bible. By the time I was confirmed, I had become more cynical about attending church services, and found them deathly boring.

I eventually became an atheist when I was about a junior in high school. This caused a major rift between me and my mother, who was also a Lutheran. Atheism was also the final cleft between my brother and me. Whereas before he was simply cold to me, now he decided to exhibit “good Christian love” by completely shunning me.

I moved to Seattle when I graduated from college in 1987. When I would return to Missoula to visit I would usually receive just a perfunctory “hello” from my brother, and that was it.

My brother was totally consumed with academic success. I think he made it through Hellgate High school with more or less a straight “A” average. He graduated with high honors in three majors from the University of Montana in fours years! He went on to get his Masters degree from Georgetown University. He then started working on his PhD. At this point his history becomes unclear to me.

He taught high school French in either Helena or Bozeman or both. This puzzled me, as I thought getting a PhD pretty much excluded having a simultaneous full time job. Between 1987 and 1997 I would ask my mother how Paul’s PhD was coming along, and I would get vague, dissembling answers.

Then things got strange. At one point my mother shared an odd anecdote with me. She said that Paul had befriended a cop in Bozeman who had taken Paul out for some recreational handgun target shooting. Sounds like healthy fun to me but knowing my brother, this was grossly atypical! The strange upshot of the story was that my mother included the detail that my brother had experienced a “falling out” with the police officer…

I imagine it goes without saying, but my parents were of the old school persuasion whereby any sort of discussion of human sexuality was utterly anathema. Montana at the time had sodomy laws on the books, the penalty being 10 years, a 10,000 dollar fine, or both. To this day I can’t bring myself to broach the subject of Paul’s lifestyle to my father…

Missoula, Montana is a divided place; being a liberal arts college town, it became a left wing Mecca within a right-wing redneck state. Attitudes toward gays are still in the dark ages for a large part of the populace. Virtually every night that I would walk across the Higgins Avenue Bridge in Missoula rednecks would yell “hey faggot” out the windows of their cars or trucks. No, I’m not exaggerating; this didn’t happen just once or twice, this was ALL THE TIME.

So I have sympathy for my brother in this way; he grew up in a sex-negative family environment, in a homophobic state where gay sex was a crime, with a hard-core religious mindset.

There is a particular attitude seen in a lot of gay men; a sort of free-wheeling haughtiness and superiority, especially toward straight men. I’ve had gay men tell me TO MY FACE that gays are “vastly cooler” than straight men. You see this when gay men accuse other gay men of being “bitchy queens”. The problem is that they can’t perceive the same haughtiness in themselves.

My brother had this in spades. An absolutely pathological, haughty self-righteousness. Couple this with a world class anal retentive personality and you have an unsympathetic character, to say the least.

When I visited my parents in 1997, I was told that my brother had fucked up his back, and was unable to work. He had moved back in with my parents, and was living in my old bedroom in the basement. This situation didn’t seem too outrageous, as he had gained a great deal of weight, which I assumed factored into back problems.

One day in late January 2006, I got a message from my father on my phone answering machine. My brother had died.

As soon as I spoke to my father, I asked him what Paul had died of. Shockingly, I was told he had died of liver failure, secondary to chronic alcohol abuse! Furthermore, I was advised that Paul had actually lost his job due to alcoholism, thus necessitating the move back to my parent’s house.

My parents were total alcohol abstainers. There was never any alcohol use in the house except for one party thrown for a bunch of my father’s legal associates. But I started drinking when I got to college, and stopped in early 1998. I totally understand the attraction alcohol has to someone afflicted with anxiety. I still struggle with anxiety, and I have absolutely no doubt my brother did too, and undoubtedly his struggle was far worse than mine. I keep a copy of my brother’s death certificate on the bulletin board beside me. Morbid? Perhaps, but it helps remind me to be healthy and happy in the here and now.

My point in all this retrospective rambling is simple: human sexuality cannot be bottled up, it must be allowed to express itself in healthy ways or really fucked-up, pathological things happen to people. Being a “closet case” is not a trivial matter. Religious fervor is no substitute for coming out.

My mother was a Lutheran, though she didn’t talk too much about religion back in those days. She was not one of those stereotypical Christians who thought rock music was the music of the Devil. Rather she was more of the elitist snob, who felt that The One True Music was classical. But she had a weakness for schlock, and owned records by the Tijuana Brass and Bert Kaempfert. We even had Whipped Cream and Other Delights in our house! She watched Lawrence Welk with some degree of reverence.

Young people today may not appreciate the intensity of the “generation gap” that many people my age experienced growing up. Long hair and rock music were not just part of the maelstrom of popular culture like they are today. For many people back then they were extremely potent and divisive symbols.

A strange and sadly comedic episode occurred at the Crowley house one day, as my mother complained that rock music was intrinsically inferior because “you couldn’t understand the words”. True enough for some songs, but the lyrics she couldn’t understand were those to The Night Chicago Died. The specific line was “and I asked someone who said, ‘bout a hundred cops are dead”. I heard the word “cops” fairly clearly, but my mother couldn’t. She enlisted my brother, whom she claimed had very acute hearing. My brother listened carefully, and pronounced that Paper Lace was singing “cubs”.

Yes, the word “cubs” made absolutely no sense at all. But bigger conflicts and stranger interpretations were to come. Not surprisingly this began for me with puberty and high school. I remember reading in Skateboarder magazine in about 1977 or 78 that some particularly cool skateboarder liked “Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and Hendrix”. By this time, I had been given a hand-me-down 8-track player. I scraped up enough money to buy Led Zeppelin’s Presence. It was immediately obvious that this was something vastly cooler and more profound than Cher, Abba, or Paper Lace. I became a life-long fan of hard rock.

Unfortunately my new-found appreciation of hard rock deeply conflicted with my mother’s growing disdain for it. I was allowed to own the records and listen to them, but was subjected to her constant and irrational arguments.

Somewhere around 1980, I discovered the book Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key. It made quite an impact on me. Unfortunately though, my critical thinking skills at the time were in a nascent stage. Certain concepts struck me as plausible, but Key’s analysis of rock music seemed farfetched, even then. I seem to remember reading about George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord, as the background vocals clearly say “Hare Krishna”, “Krishna, Krishna” and related lines.

I remembered that my mother had this song on a 45 disk; she bought it because it was a Good Christian Song. To tell the truth, I don’t think I had listened to the song very critically until I read Key’s analysis. I put the record on, and sure enough, the Krishna stuff was there, plain as day!

My mother had a bad habit of promoting a particular logical fallacy, namely that superior perceptual capacity is equivalent to superior ability to discern value. The problem is that “value” is a metaphysical concept, an arbitrary human invention, not the subject of science or mathematics. In fact this is the core conundrum of all aesthetic thinking; at best one can argue meaningfully about whether concepts are logically consistent, but you can’t point to a “good” in the universe like you can point to a chunk of aluminium.

My mother claimed that she had once taken something called the “Seashore Test” and had done particularly well. It was an audiology test. Now I have no doubt that audiology is a genuine science, and that meaningful date can be gathered. There are plenty of perceptual tests in psychology that are grounded in good science. I didn’t doubt my mother’s claim. So I was curious how she would react when I told her that My Sweet Lord was really about Krishna. Payback time!

At first I just told her. Understandably she didn’t believe me, so we went into the living room and put on the record. At first I couldn’t believe my mother couldn’t hear (or perceive) the background vocals. I think I put the record on again, this time lip-syncing along with the “Krishna, Krishna” vocals.

Unbelievably, my mother still couldn’t hear it! At this point I had one of the first epiphanies of my life. I realized there were only three logical possibilities. The first was that she genuinely couldn’t hear it. I don’t think this was the case; she was not hard of hearing. It wasn’t as if the sounds were at 16,000 Hz and too high to hear, or super-faint. The background vocals are clear and obvious.

The second possibility was that she was lying to me. I don’t believe this either, though I must accept it as a possibility. My parents were both profoundly moral people. Our family never “joshed” each other, never “told stories” even if they were revealed as such later, and absolutely never bullshitted each other. It was a very rigid upbringing emotionally, and very much out of step with the rest of the world.

No, what I think was really going on with my mother was that she was in denial. Clearly the situation was too much for her; for the first time in our series of never-ending musical arguments I was absolutely and unequivocally correct. Her vaunted perceptual skills had failed her, and rather spectacularly so. And I’m sure it shocked her that what she thought was Christian was really Krishna!

Of course she had to come up with some kind of rationalization; “There’s too much noise” or “You can’t understand what they are saying”. Frankly I don’t remember what it was…

This was the first time I had seen a human behave like this, and it happened to be my mother. It came as a shock to me, and I began to feel bad that I had hurt or confused my mother in some deep, dark, and strange way.

As I grew older, I became much more of a skeptic about all sorts of things. Skeptics see the kind of denial that my mother exhibited all the time. Evidence for extraordinary claims is scrutinized, and sometimes it’s clearly shown to have a prosaic explanation. For most people it becomes like that old V8 Juice slogan; “I could have had a V8”. When you see the prosaic explanation, you think, “Oh my goodness, that’s so simple, how could we have possibly believed it was evidence for Bigfoot/Orbs/Ghosts/ESP, etc”. Yet there will ALWAYS be true believers who madly cling to the original belief.

The hardest lesson that I take away from the My Sweet Lord episode is that intelligence does not guarantee good judgment. I could see that early on with my mother, and as the years go by, I see it in myself.