Brendenn Bremmer

      On March 18th, 2005, Brendenn Bremmer put a gun to his head and ended his life. He was 14 years old. He showed no signs of depression, he had remarkable musical talent and intelligence, he graduated high school at age ten. His life was perfect, he was already accomplished, and he was on his way to start a career in anesthesiology. Despite his learning things quickly, he wasn't pushed by his parents, he simply wanted to learn to read among a slew of other things at age three. Brendenn had experience and interest in firearms, so death by accident was ruled out. 

    His mother was a novelist, very Christian, who noted her son's interest in the spiritual world and always doing the right thing; she speculated his suicide was enacted in order to give his organs to those in need; "he came, he taught, he left." His father said, “He’s become a teacher. He says right now he’s actually being taught how to help these people who experience suicides for much messier reasons. Before Brandenn was born, this was planned."

    This event 15 years ago had the nation asking... Why? Why would such a gifted person in a loving family with scant signs of social anxiety or depression end his life with absolutely no warning? I have a theory.

    I am 27 years old, with scant signs of social anxiety or depression, from a loving family, with a successful career as an Air Force pilot. I almost tried to end my life one day with absolutely no warning. Brendenn's story and mine should terrify America. 

    I have musical talent and intelligence. I knew how to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car. My life is perfect, I'm already accomplished, and I have started my career as a pilot. Despite learning things quickly, I wasn't pushed by my parents, I simply wanted to learn electrical engineering among a slew of other things. I am experienced and interested in firearms and any accident in that regard would be unlikely.

    My mother was a novelist, very Christian, and I hope she recognizes my interest in the spiritual world and always doing the right thing. I would never end my life to donate my organs. I don't believe any rational person would do that. I hope my father thinks of me as a teacher to help people and would do anything to end America's mental health crisis that takes 50,000 lives each year.

    I deployed in December. In Germany I took an Ambien and while asleep called my wife and rambled about someone I didn't know named "Janet". The next day while telling me about it, that reminded her to recommend The Good Place. I watched it. That sparked my interest in Ethics, while deployed to a warzone in which we probably don't belong. I also watched Messiah, which sparked my interest in theology. I also read, a lot. In April I went home, and I read more. 

    In July, I decided to follow the example of Eleanor Shellstrop and better myself; so I quit drinking, I started working out, and I started paying more attention to everything I watched and read as a result. At some point in August, I realized all the media I was consuming had something in common. I realized this could be used for good instead of evil or futility, and I may very well have been the first person to have that realization other than people like Brendenn Bremmer.

    The more I paid attention to what I watched and read the less I slept, and my mental health quickly deteriorated to think either I could predict the future, Seth Meyers was talking about me, or God was communicating via coincidences. This happened in a matter of days; while Brendenn Bremmer probably would've kept to himself and carried on, I was extroverted enough to talk to my entire family about my conspiracy theories. And they told me I was crazy but it would all be fixed if I just went to sleep. They were wrong.

    How many other people start to confuse one coincidence after another in rapid succession for God or Seth Meyers talking to them? How many people are told they need to be locked in a mental institution if weird things starts happening to them? Why can't people who are confused about life just go to a psychiatrist, have an honest conversation, and get the medication they need BEFORE they need to be restrained and injected with Lorazepam? 

    As absurdity approaches infinity, the probability of it being real approaches zero. But that does not mean it's impossible for a rational person to flip a coin ten times in a row and predict it every single time. If you watch an hour long standup special from three years ago, and every single joke has some application in something you've thought that day, the chances that time travel is real is still zero, but that does not mean it's impossible to happen. Even though the chances are astronomically low, a rational person would turn to God or science or something bound to their life, instead of admitting the impossible. 

    I believe that is why we have a mental health crisis in this country. Depression and burnout rates are through the roof and luckily COVID may have lead to positive changes in that regard. But for rational healthy people, they may eventually realize that this world is absolutely absurd and God is talking to them even though he would want us all to survive. They just think they can get to something better.

“You see, we don’t know how to explain these kids — not scientifically.”

The Feedback Loop

On 29 July 2020, my life changed. I stopped drinking, bought a kayak, and went fishing. My wife and I had purchased a trailer and straps and all the necessary accoutrements so loading should've been a breeze. It wasn't. The kayak would get crooked, the straps twisted, and it took half an hour. "This system needs to be better", I thought. 

There is one system in particular that has always fascinated me: the positive feedback loop. That is when the output is increased by a factor, and fed back into the same system as an input. With it, scales near infinity can be reached fairly quickly. Drinking is a positive feedback loop. You drink, you become hungover, and you drink to overcome it. It's a dirty hack of our own minds. And as I said, drinking at scales near infinity can be reached fairly quickly with this particular feedback model. But what if you applied a positive feedback loop, well, positively? What would happen?

I thought of that while spending another thirty minutes trying to tie down a kayak. If I could just incrementally make it easier, the efficiency would skyrocket, and quickly too. The first trip I discovered it's far easier if you remember which direction the clip needs to to be facing. The second trip I discovered the straps won't twist if you lay them out before wrapping. The third trip I found you only need two straps, not three. Those incremental improvements, while insignificant in their own right, become part of a system to tie down a kayak as quickly as possible.

The best part is no one had to teach me. There are hundreds of YouTube videos about tying down kayaks; I know, I've seen them. I could've asked my in-laws how they do it. But I didn't have to. All it took were small inputs, multiplied over time. It no longer takes me 30 minutes to tie down my kayak, but I thought to myself, "okay, that worked, but it was too easy. A feedback loop can't possibly be the secret to menial chores." With that I started experimenting. 

Sobriety, nobody wants it but some people need it. I'm not one of those people, but I was drinking a lot, and I did want to cut back. So how can we reduce something with feedback? Introducing the negative feedback loop, the deranged twin of positive feedback. How can we take every input to a system, and reduce it over time?

Well, step one: remove alcohol from the house. That's easy enough. Step two: don't go places where there is alcohol. Step three: do something else. Kayak fishing was perfect. All I had to do was go fishing and not drink at the same time, and I would not drink. When I got home, if I had to mow the lawn, I would mow the lawn and not drink. Starting at day one, this seems impossible. However, every single task or miniature adventure led to some dopamine being released with a lack of alcohol, and that was important to me. This is the negative feedback loop; every input goes through the system, the output is lower than it started, and it goes through again. You can reach zero, or approach an asymptote to zero, fairly quickly with these as well.   

That's two points for feedback loops. Then I started getting cocky, what if we tried layering feedback loops onto each other. I'm just gonna apply some negative feedback to combat my urge to sleep in, throw in something positive to take better care of my house, I'll figure out how to best structure my weekend by developing a feedback loop for planning the day. Oh, it went well. I was tackling three or four house projects per weekend, working out everyday, reading, still had time for fishing and screwing around; the implication was clear. This system works. And it works a lot better than the previous system I had.

There were THREE WEEKS of this bliss in life. Things worked, I worked, the system worked. Sometimes the line was blurred with trial and error, that's how much I can trivialize efficiency. Can't back a trailer on the first try at your favorite fishing spot? Well pick a tree, try aiming for that. Didn't work? Pick a new tree. It's still positive feedback as long as you get closer to the goal with each stroke. After a handful of tries, if you have a good memory for which tree worked, you're gonna back that trailer in dead center every time from then on.

So, where did it all go wrong? Things got weird after that. Really weird. MacDill found a guided missile at the Lakeland Airport and the US Postal Service was being sabatoged by the president and there's this website called Imgur. and I had the bright idea of applying a positive feedback loop to gain fake points on the internet. 

I Had a Dream

Good morning, I had a dream last night. In it, I was playing with dynamite in Washington State. But I never blew myself up, because I knew how dynamite worked. Actually, it may have been ammonium nitrate. That would make a lot more sense. I'm guessing you saw the dramatic explosion that took out Beruit (if not, drop everything and watch it now). I ended up down the Google rabbit hole reading about ammonium nitrate, and was aghast to find that similar ammonium nitrate explosions have happened dozens of times throughout history. In fact, so many have happened recently that there are 3 or 4 caught on camera, like Beirut or Tiangjin.... The Beruit explosion was 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. The Oklahoma City bombing was 0.18 tonnes of the same. The biggest nitrate explosion, however, happened in 1921 in post WW1 Germany, at 4,500 tonnes. So I started reading about that... In WW1 Germany, they used ammonium sulfate for artillery, but we're running out of sulfur. So they started making a 50/50 cocktail of ammonium sulfate/nitrate. Well, when those chemicals are stored together they liquify and harden, becoming a solid resembling plaster or dry wall. Since it was stored in silos, it was very difficult to retrieve because they had to mine it out with pickaxes. Until they found a quicker method: blowing up the silo with dynamite (that is 100% true look it up). They literally were using dynamite to blow out their bomb reagants. Now, the Germans had sworn up and down that this was safe, and done tests to show that as long as it'll less than 60% nitrate it WONT blow up. In fact, throughout WW1 they used the dynamite method 20,000 times to retrieve their explosives, without anything bad happening. But their tests were flawed, it's not the composition that mattered for stability, it was humidity of the substance. As long as it's above 2% humidity, it won't blow up, and as it came out of the factory it was 3-4% so it didn't. Until it had six years to dry in the silos, then it was below 2% humidity, and they dropped an actual dynamite charge into a 4,500 tonnes silo of explosives. Boom. The Germans no longer use dynamite in conjunction with their explosives. And from what I can tell, the Lebanese no longer store their confiscated explosives in Hangar 12 of the port.

I Had a Dream

Good morning. I had a dream last night that I played with dynamite in Washington State. I didn't blow myself up, necessarily, maybe because it was ammonium nitrate instead of nitroglycerin. That's a big difference. I'm assuming you've heard

Show Your Work

little more time. thanks for showing me that.

The Internet: Where everything's made up, but the points still matter...

 The sins of the son are not the sins of the father.

Do you really want to go on a Pixar-level adventure? Do you want to experience all the tropes of growth, betrayal, and growth again? Are you SURE you want to live and breathe every moment of it, just like I have? Remember, consent is STILL the most important thing in a room, or a house, or a country, or the world. But fine, I'll give it to myself. 

Let's start with me saying that I have never been abused. Period. Dot. Full stop. Hold short. Line up and wait. Now read it again if you need.

  My parents may not live forever, but at the very least I can predict they will live long lives and die naturally. My dad is an actuary (recently retired), that means he's an expert on probability and very mathematically intelligent. My mom was in sales for a while, including after I was born in West Palm Beach. She spent a lot of her later years as a romance writer, I have a hunch I'm a character in a few of her books. I did not consent to that but I find it ironically amusing so I consented after the fact to help sell her writing. 

I was an only child in a loving home. I may have been adopted, but all data points to a very normal childhood. I always felt I was extraordinarily lucky to have been born into my family by chance; despite wanting to go to Rio de Janeiro and own a yacht as badly as I did, I was thankful to have parents to spend time with and could forget about things like fame. Nothing was wrong, year after year. When problems did arise, we could have a discussion about what to do next. My dad would always remind me: "Do you still want to be a pilot? Because this thing you're hooked on will prevent you."

Until about a week ago, I always answered yes, and changed my behavior to fit into the "Air Force Pilot" proud-father-and-son persona. But this time I had lied, and it was a huge fucking lie. When I realized what I had done, and it took a while, I could no longer answer yes until I'd fixed it. I had to change my behavior away from being a pilot and husband. My father and mother being alive are worth far more to me than some cloth wings on my flight suit. That's why I've been so weird lately: I had to tell everyone without confirming the bias of anyone.

Betrayal is a real thing, just like currency. It can be exchanged as easily as making a transaction, you can build on it, layer after layer, and off of it you can become rich. Is that a world we want to live in? Where you can't tell if a pedophile really died by suicide? I don't. I want a world in which mental health appointments aren't career-ending or divorce-forcing affairs. I want a world where the microphone in my phone will rat me out for having a beer or missing a workout, but not something I said with three people in the house when I was bursting at the seams with anger. Unfortunately, that world isn't ours yet; it's not even Altered Carbon's world yet. 

The problem with having a beer to relax with your family, is I may honest-to-God make a mistake that can never be truly undone. It's as close to thoughtcrime as possible, it's disgusting to even think about unless you're totally honest. It may take years or decades to undo such a betrayal, but every time I see my family alive the truth gets reinforced and confirmed. You lose the power of thought when you're under the influence. You lose the ability to consent, to recognize consent, to recognize your own mind's power. That's morality at work. 

We have so many currencies it's impossible to keep track. There's cryptocurrency, penny stocks, pennies themselves, gold, credit, or silver coins with Caligula's face imprinted. Happiness is the opposite of betrayal.

Morality is the currency of the Universe. Well, no. Energy is the currency of the Universe, in it there are four forces. Morality is something different, it's more binary than the rest of the world. Living a life with ethics and morals in mind scales greatly when you want powers such as forcing a hurricane away from you or willing a pond into filling with water. It scales even quicker when you start making decisions based off of social media accounts or Google, whose algorithms are fined tune to reward you as long as you keep scrolling. This effect is extremely powerful, as I've come to learn after Googling it. 

Allow me to explain why I think I was chosen for this particular book. There's so many books on the White House coming out every day, why does mine matter more? Why do I matter? Well, at some point, tech companies started reaping the harvest that is our data. In February 2003, Google acquired Blogger.com, and thus acquired almost every word I've ever written about my awesome, interesting life online. That shouldn't matter, they harvest everyone's data. Billions of people are stored somewhere, and that's creepy until you figure out how to use it to your advantage. What came next, I believe, was a chess match between me and a supercomputer, and eventually I believe a team of people became involved; but my life up until now has been a intelligence face-off of epic proportions. And I WON! (We won. We all won.).

Google does not have the power to create a hurricane. I know that for a fact because my refrigerator might've stopped making noise. Google does not have the power to force a hurricane away from Tampa, Florida. There's only one person alive who's smart enough to predict something like that. Only entity I can think of, that during a media blackout, could predict someone's pool and pond refilling within days of his dad coming to the aide of his deteriorating mental health. Of course in hindsight, there was a tropical depression leading to more rain than we've had in months. How could that be possible and me not know about it?

Well, the first thing I had to do to find out, was apologize to my extended family for texting them hundreds of messages which were predetermined (by me), at four in the morning. Behavior like that is what gets you committed; but in the end they accepted my apology and the pond filled up in less than a day. 

In the next chapter: Perpetual Motion Machine of Morality. I'd love to keep writing but I have a tumor on my neck that's making me lose sleep and act very hyperactively. Google hyperthyroidism, then Google hypothyroidism which is what my wife has. There are no coincidences in the Universe.

Short Thoughts on Record

 Let me just say once and for all:

You can say a-queue-stick.

You can say a-coo-stick.

But it has to match the way you say coupon. 

That is all. Gif inserted here. Subliminal messaging works for baby boomers too.