Brain Machine

The made-for-podcast version of Brain Machine, Andrew Gordon Bailey's critically acclaimed 2017 solo play that interweaves the story of the inter-web's creation with his own experience going viral online.  WARNING: The show discusses sexual assault in a non-explicit manner.
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The most important essay ever (arguably)
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Transcript

Brain Machine, By Andrew Gordon Bailey

It’s nearly spring, which is to say still winter. It’s early March, 1890. We’re in Essex Mass. The port of Boston. A child is born. His father christens him Vannevar after his father’s associate the Rev’d John Van Evar. The father’s name is the Reverend Richard Bush. A.k.a. Dick Bush. He’s a good man, this father. Not simply because he doesn’t name his son after himself. But also he’s a universalist preacher. Universalists believe that all humankind is beloved of God and we will all eventually be redeemed.

Vannevar is a sickly child. But his father loves him. Nurtures him. And Vannevar flourishes. He grows up to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering jointly from MIT and Harvard. He devotes his life to inventions that will help humanity. While still an undergrad he invents a topographical surveyor, using bicycle wheels, a pendulum, and moxie. In his early thirties he refines radios, making it possible to plug them in. In his mid-thirties he invents the computer. Well, a computer. Some people call it the first. Others, including Vannevar himself don’t, but it’s the cutting edge for nearly 20 years. When America joins WWII, FDR makes Vannevar Bush his chief science advisor. Vannevar is responsible for the US military’s research and development. Anything to help win the war. Medicine, radar, armor, fuel, transport systems, control systems, weapons. A lot of weapons. Vannevar Bush is a, maybe the, driving force behind the Manhattan project. Vannevar Bush, named after a Universalist preacher, son of a Universalist preacher, raised to believe that all humankind is beloved of God, Vannevar Bush who devoted his life to inventions to help all humanity, Vannevar Bush helps bring us the Atomic bomb. 

I’m a technophobe. Technology’s gotten so distracting. So noisy. I hate things that are distracting and noisy.

But I move to Toronto anyway. 

I move partly for a woman. And as I get off the plane I look at her. I think yes, we are so in love, I made the right decision moving here. Three days later I say to her: What’s going on? Ever since I moved to Toronto you’ve been cold and distant. She says, you know when you got off the plane you had that feeling? I say, “Yeah.” She says: I didn’t. And so we broke up a year later.

I also moved to Toronto to be a writer. In Vancouver I’d belonged to this writing group. Three or four of us were really serious. One of us, not me, got into the Canadian Film Centre: that’s this jumping off point that helps you break in to Canadian TV. Allowing you to make a real living – like you could afford having children – as a creative writer in Canada. Over the next year I work my ass off to make a fantastic application. You need a long form letter of intent, writing CV, two spec scripts, two letters of recommendation from industry professionals, one first born child. Doesn’t have to be yours. Another writing group friend applies the same year as me. Her boyfriend looks at both of our applications. Seems he might like mine better. They break up afterward. Not because of that. 

Point is: we both have good applications. My friend gets in. I don’t. But not only do I not get in, most of my writing group’s now in Toronto. My girlfriend’s in Toronto. I move to Toronto, determined to make a better application for next year. I work for a month as an intern on a TV movie. That is I work seventy-hour weeks for a multinational corporation where they pay a quarter of a quarter of minimum wage for insurance purposes only. It’s not about money. It’s to make good contacts. I make the good contacts. They write good letters of recommendation. I write a good spec script. That’s where you write for an existing show to prove you can write. I study How I Met Your Mother, frame by frame. I train myself so I can pause an unseen episode three minutes in and predict what every character will say next and how every plotline will progress. You might say, “Yeah, well sitcoms are predictable.” Yes, but it takes training. 

The spec I write is so reasonably decent. That’s what you’re going for: reasonably decent. You want someone to read it and go, “This could be the show.” Mine could have been the fourth best episode in their third best season. It is so pretty okay. My writing group friends who’ve gone through the program say the spec script is good. My whole application is good. Really. They wouldn’t change a thing. They help me to schmooze with some of the people at the Canadian Film Centre. I hate schmoozing but I need to schmooze so I schmooze. This year I will leave nothing to chance. This year I will not fail.

So, after I fail, my friends recommend me to some agents. The agents read my stuff. They like my stuff. They ask me for more stuff. I send them more stuff. They say this is good stuff. No one’s working right now. Try again in six months. Send us new stuff.

I’ve been living off of ten years worth of savings but I’m now running out of money. I despise Toronto. The air is thick and frozen in the winter. Summer smells like hot garbage. Never ending concrete urbanity sprawls in and out in every direction but to the south where there’s a lake but you can’t even get to that lake without crossing ten lanes of freeway and another six lanes of highway and it’s not even that good a lake. I didn’t become a writer to make bad Canadian television in Toronto. If I’m going to be a starving…peckish artist I’d like to at least be an artist. Make something meaningful.

Like, when I was 17 I felt disconnected and alone, unlike other 17-year-olds. It was a rough time, but I watched this puppet show called Tinka’s New Dress. Me and this show connected. It made me feel slightly less alone. I guess I’ve always wanted to create something that gives that feeling to someone else.

So I move to a rustic cedar wood cabin in a forest on an island off the west coast. My grandma’s grandpa lived on this island. He built his own steam powered carousel for summer tourists to this island. He was a great steam engineer. Terrible everything else. His land got divided over generations so the end result is my grandma has a cabin that nobody uses in the winter. 

Because it leaks heat. Which is a moot point because it’s an A frame. So any heat you make rises to the rafters and gets stuck there. Heating the place on the warmest days I can still see my breath. But no rent and I’m a writer in a cabin.

Every morning I wake up at 5. I turn on the space heater. You can’t keep it on at night in case you kick off your blankets and burn to death. I write till 7 or 8. By this point the back room is warm-er. But I can’t stay in the back room all day. It’s dark. It’s mostly just this ancient squeaky spring bed. The ceiling is right here \. 

But the rest of the cabin is colder inside than it is outside. There’s even a wind chill somehow. My first morning there I made a huge fire. In the fireplace. But it takes a tonne of fuel to keep a decent fire going and small fires suck heat up the chimney. They make it colder. So fires are evenings only. The best way to warm yourself is literally just to warm yourself from the inside. I’m constantly drinking hot liquids. Before the cabin I was not a coffee drinker. A week in, I’m a six cups an hour addict.

I write till lunch. When I have soup: more hot liquid. Then I write more. Then I go outside. Collect wood. Chop wood. Cord wood. Knowing future comfort depends on this wood. In the evening I make a fire. Sit and write right in front of it. Dinner is hot soup.

Living alone and eating soup in a cabin is not lonely. The fire in the hearth is a presence. It makes you want to connect with other people. Family. I call my extended family. Every night we have meaningful conversations. My writing is meaningful. Focused yet unconstrained. I create a novel I truly love. It gets published. It gets read by my mom. And at least a dozen other people. Which is pretty good. I mean who reads novels anymore?

Vannevar Bush doesn’t do too much handwringing about the bomb. There’s a war to win against the Japanese Imperial Army and the Nazis who could be making the bomb. These are not handwringing people. Vannevar is integral to the Allies’ success, and as the war draws to a close FDR asks him to steer science in a new direction now that there’s going to be peace forever. So Vannevar Bush writes an essay. He also starts the National Science Foundation but this essay is maybe the most important essay ever. Which is pretty obnoxious. He couldn’t have left that accolade for a writer. 

In his essay, entitled “As We May Think”, Vannevar refers to humankind as one race. One people. Through science we have increased our physical abilities. We’ve increased our life expectancy with antibiotics, surgery, vaccines, almond milk. We’ve increased our physical strength through steam shovels, through trip hammers. We’ve increased our speed with automobiles and jet planes. But we’ve never increased our ability to think. Computers in 1945 compute. They are brute calculators, even the one that Vannevar invented. They’re not thinking machines. There’s so much information out there in 1945. There’s so much information it could fill a book. Several books actually. Too many books to fit into one person’s library. Too much information for one mind to cope with. 

So Vannevar envisions a machine that he christens the Memex. The Memex will use futuristic microfilm to fit all the books of the world, all the magazines, all the scientific papers including those yet to be written, it will fit them all into one machine the size of a desk. But it’s not simply a library in a desk. Our minds don’t work like libraries. We don’t dream in dewey decimals. We don’t think linearly [struggle to pronounce “linearily/linyearly/lin-early”]. We don’t think in a linear fashion like a book. Our minds are associative. They make what Vannevar Bush calls associative trails. The Memex will have two screens to facilitate this. Let’s say you want to understand why the Turkish Bow worked better than the English longbow. You find a relevant, interesting, but not particularly detailed article. Leave it projected. You find the perfect passage from a book. You tap a key to record an association between the article and the passage. The passage leads you to a competing theory on the elasticity of bowstrings. Another association. Soon you’re not thinking about bows at all anymore. You’ve started a side trail about strings. Which leads to another side trail about violins. You make association after association. Link after link. Trail after trail. Till you have a wide web of them. 

The doctor can make associative trails for a disease. The chemist for covalent bonds. The actuary for what they do. The historian has it especially tough. Because humankind is one race. You can’t just be Eurocentric anymore. The historian must deal with the whole human record. Everything we’ve done. The historian must cut a path through it all, must blaze a useful trail through our vast collective human experience so we can truly understand ourselves. Understand each other. If we fail to do this we may just keep fighting war after war with science delivering crueler and crueler weapons. We may destroy ourselves. But if we succeed, science gives us hope for a bright and beautiful new age. An age of understanding. An age of information.

I have to thank the interweb for the magic. Twice a week, give or take, I’d hike from the cabin down to the island library to get online. I’d keep a list of things I needed to research for my novel. So one day I’m looking up classical philosophy… I type the letters CL and Google suggests clever gift ideas. My friend Rod’s birthday is coming so I follow the link. There’s a punch the monkey game at the top. It’s an annoying monkey but I don’t want to be distracted so I click on a link for the clever soup mug with a crevice for your crackers, but then the page re-sets itself and decides nope: you punched the monkey, which leads to a pop up which says I can make a tonne of money from my email. Obviously a scam but it reminds me to check my email. So I do. A friend’s suggested that I become a fan of Toastmasters international on Facebook. So I go on Facebook where my “friends” have posted links to a stream of clickbait thinkpieces, and there’s an ad on the side for Snorg T Shirts with a very attractive Snorg T Shirt model, but I will not be distracted. But this one friend’s suggested I look at a deleted scene from ET which was my favourite movie growing up, so I follow the link to a Drew Barrymore fanpage. There’s a clip from when she was 20 years old on David Letterman that 15 year old me had really wanted to see so I not totally accidentally click on it and suddenly there’s a pop up for a naked celebrities website. So now I’m thinking about naked celebrities, the 20-year-old version of Drew Barrymore, and the Snorg T shirt model. But I won’t be distracted so I steer my thoughts back to Classical Philosophy like De Rerum Natura by Lucretius but of course Lucretius wrote that if you’re thinking about sex too much you should just masturbate so I’m like: “I’m in a library! Lucretius!” [Thinks for a moment] “No!” So instead I follow a link from Drew Barrymore to Adam Sandler movies and now I’m watching the trailer for Adam Sandler’s latest comedy That’s My Boy. And it inspires me.

The setup for That’s My Boy has a 13-year-old kid impregnating his schoolteacher. The judge shames the teacher for the damage she’s done to the kid. Then they cut to the kid high fiving his friends. B/c they’d love to be damaged like that if you know what I mean. I mean teacher’s hot and they are horny. Seeing this trailer I think, “I hate Feminism.”

There’s an associative trail here. When I was 13 I got touched every day at my locker. It was a gang of girls about my age. They never touched my penis. You can protect your penis. But it was everywhere else and it was every day for about half a year. A rumour started that the girls were beating me up. Some of the guys defended me saying, “The girls are groping him. He’s enjoying it.” I smiled, nodded. I laughed. I hated it so much. 

Now you might ask, “Why smile, why laugh, why keep going to your locker every day if you hated it so much?” Well, for one thing, the teachers don’t let you take every book to every class and more than that, I just wanted it to be normal. It’s not a big deal. It’s junior high. We all have things we had to endure.

A couple of years later I’m struggling with this. I’m afraid of being groped by girls and even more afraid of groping them. My hand shakes if ever I’m alone with them. This movie comes out called Disclosure. Demi Moore gropes Michael Douglas against his will and he doesn’t like it. All the reviewers say not believable. It’s Demi Moore. She’s hot. Any guy would love it.

Soon after there’s a Murphy Brown episode about sexual harassment. One of the white male buffoons that can’t hold a candle to Murphy says, “You know, men can be sexually harassed too.” And Murphy Brown the feminist icon of early to mid 90s CBS primetime sitcoms says, “You just watched Disclosure, didn’t you?” Cue laugh track. Cue applause sign. ‘Cause in the real world it doesn’t ha ha ha happen to men. 

In university I still shake sometimes. I get angry when I walk past the sexual assault centre because it is for women only. Because it doesn’t happen to men.

Years and years of tv and movies make variations of the joke it can’t happen to men or it’s hilarious when it happens to men or men would want it anyway and what’s really funny is I sometimes even now two decades later, on a bad day, sometimes I still shake.

So, the “That’s My Boy” trailer truly does inspire me. I research the phenomena of 13-year-old boys and their teachers. I follow link to link. Association to association. Pain to pain. I learn a lot about men and boys getting sexually assaulted. A lot of the people most concerned about this are feminists. Other feminists call them out saying that it doesn’t happen to men. It can’t happen to men because power structures. But the first group of feminists say yeah it can happen to men. It does happen. Power structures or not there isn’t an okay form of sexual assault. I realize, I don’t hate feminism. I hate some feminism. The some feminism that says sexual assault can’t happen to men. I hate the some masculinism that says it can’t happen to men. I hate some of everything. I hate all assault. Except for a bit a salt on popcorn. (“We needed some levity.”)

In a frenzy, drawing on my research and my own experience I write a monologue about a guy named Will who thinks rape is hilarious when it happens to dudes. He slowly reveals that his attractive teacher ‘seduced’ him when he was 13. The guys made fun of him for not enjoying it until he said, “Pscyh, I totally did enjoy it.” Then they laugh with him rather than at him. By laughing, he is a hero, not a victim. By laughing he can hide his pain; he can pretend things are normal. He finds rape hilarious because he has to.

When I perform this at a comedy cabaret a few months later some people don’t consider it comedy. But some people love it. Two of these people work for a publisher. That’s how my novel gets published. Other people approach me. Men approach me who’ve been raped. They thank me.

I move back to the real world. I record the monologue. I’m hesitant to release it. It’s not really my story. Not exactly. But one day I almost accidentally delete my recording because bad at technology. I haven’t seen anything else like it online. Some people did find it helpful. My publisher says I should have an online presence. So I put the monologue on YouTube. Leave it there. Have some cheerios. I set up an orientation shift for a joe job. Then things go a bit… viral.