There is only one problem with the world, the problem with the world has always been the same, the knowledge of good & evil. Whether you believe the story of Adam & Eve or not, the problem of the knowledge of good & evil is a universal truth and it has plagued mankind since the dawn of time. It ends now.
The rules are, there are no rules, so don't try to force other people to play by your rules. You have no knowledge of good & evil, you are not like God.
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A TALE OF MADNESS AND DISCOVERY
You are a poor man, do not say “since I am poor I cannot seek out knowledge.” Rather, bend your back to all discipline, and in the abundance of your intellectual potential investigate the Mysteries of Existence. Then you will know what is bitter for a man, and what is sweet for a person.
[Dead Sea Scrolls 4Q416, 418]
Foreword
When I was younger I wanted to be crazy, I wanted to be unique. I thought it would make me cool. The reality of being crazy was very different to what I had imagined. It was much more exciting, much more terrifying, and much tougher than I thought. When I first discovered the infinite Universe I was just plain crazy, I was just another schizophrenic Messiah. In the years that followed my body of work became more and more impressive, until one day there was no denying it any longer. I was indeed sent here for a purpose, but for what purpose? I still don’t know. The signs point the way, but they never tell you the destination. What I do know is that I was never meant to fail.
This isn’t a story about me making a bunch of shit up, this is a true tale of madness and discovery. God took me to the edge of the abyss, and then he pushed me over it. I was lucky to survive, but it’s not over yet. This is only the beginning, and my journey, our journey, may never be over. This isn’t about me, this is about every person on the planet, I did this for you.
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In The Beginning…
I was born Michael David Mulligan at Nepean Hospital in Kingswood (Penrith) to Rosemary Joan Mulligan (nee Blair-Hickman) and William David Mulligan on the 10th of March, 1981.
When I was born and my mother saw me for the first time, she thought there was something wrong with me, that the doctors had done something to me. I was born with a large birthmark that covers most of my left inner thigh. The birthmark on my thigh is unusual, not just for its size. I have never really investigated it apart from the odd Google search, but I have never heard of one like it. I think that birthmark is a thin layer of skin. You can see the veins and blood vessels underneath the surface and it’s quite hot, body temperature hot. I always felt embarrassed but lucky to have that birthmark, I loved the way that it kept my hands warm on cold nights.
My father has schizophrenia and my parents divorced when I was very young. He used to tell me that his father is the smartest man in the world, he’s the second smartest man in the world, and I’m the third smartest man in the world. Somehow I doubted that my father and his father were the smartest men in the world, but I always knew that I was pretty smart. He told me how Isaac Newton was the smartest man in history, and how he discovered the theory of gravity by watching a falling apple. He used to compare me to Isaac Newton constantly and say “you’re Isaac Newton’s right arm, Mickey.” He also talked a lot about aliens. He told me he had three alien friends, one was a kangaroo man, another had veins wrapped around his head, the third I don’t recall, but I used to dream of those aliens visiting me. He told me that when the world ends they were going to come and take him, my sister Katie and myself away and save us. He also constantly called my mum a witch, which used to make me very uncomfortable.
The last time I saw him as a child still haunts me. He was asking me to come and live with him, raving on about aliens and the end of the world. I was probably about five or six, but I wasn’t stupid. As much as I loved him, I knew he couldn’t take care of me, provide a home, or get me to school, so I told him I couldn’t come with him and that I wanted to live with mum. He grabbed me just below the shoulders, at the top of my arms and shouted at the top of his lungs, “you’re not smart enough, Mickey!” His shouting reverberated around the street, and I can still hear those words reverberating in my mind, “you’re not smart enough, Mickey.” It’s the story of my life, no matter how smart I was, I was never smart enough. He didn’t come around again, my mum took care of Katie and myself until she remarried.
After my parents divorced my mum dated a couple of guys, but she met the man who would become my step-father, Ken Spears, at the neighbour Tom’s party. I really liked Ken when I was little, I thought he knew everything. I used to ask him a lot of questions, as kids do, and he always seemed to have the answers. Mum and Ken got married when I was about ten, and my father gave up his rights to me and Katie. Ken legally adopted us and we changed our names to Spears. We also moved around the corner to Ken’s place.
I was pretty keen to change my name to Spears, I never did like the name Mulligan. The other kids at school used to make jokes about my name. Spears seemed like a pretty cool name to me, and lots of people began to call me by my last name. Mum and Ken had two more children together, my sister Sally and my brother Tom.
We all have childhoods, but it was at university that my life really changed, at the age of 20 I lost my mind, and I found myself.
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Chapter 1
To plead insanity one must show
that they did not know the difference between right and wrong.
For my life, I plead “no knowledge of good and evil.”
My “thing” as a teenager and as a young adult was that wherever I was, I had to be the most wasted person there. It’s like I thought it made me cool to be blind drunk, like the village drunkard in an early Irish novel. There’s a saying, “beer then grass you’re on your arse, grass then beer you’re in the clear,” my method was grass then beer then grass. It wasn’t a night out if I wasn’t violently ill. I looked up to famous drunks and dope fiends, I loved Hunter S. Thompson, I wanted to be like him, completely out of my mind on drugs and liquor. So cool, so very cool… or so I thought.
After school I entered into a degree in chemical engineering at UNSW. During second year I started to call it “advanced index reading,” it seemed like all we had to do was learn our way around the textbook and the course was a piece of piss. Chemical engineering is all about a myriad of different equations for every possible situation in chemical plants, so because there were so many damn equations you get to take the textbook into the exam. You look up the equation you need, then you look up all the values you need to substitute into those equations. All you had to do was learn where to find everything in the textbook and you could pass the exams.
I made it through second year uni with no problems, then things began to change because my best friends at uni were both studying similar but different degrees. My friend Ben studied petroleum engineering, while my friend Adam studied industrial chemistry, and when third year came around we really didn’t have many classes together any more. I spent a lot more time on my own, and I began to get a little weird, and when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
I still hung out with my old crew from high school, we called ourselves Team Tron. We got the name from an obsession with the 3D Simpsons episode, there is a line where Homer asks “has anyone seen that movie Tron?” Team Tron consisted of my friends Tim, Davo, Nogg and myself. Nogg got schizophrenia in high school, we used to laugh about it, he claimed he had five magic powers and we were always trying to find out what his powers were. So by this time Nogg had stopped smoking pot because of his schizophrenia, and that was pretty much all the rest of us ever did, so Nogg didn’t hang around with us as much as he did in high school. Whenever I did see Nogg he was always going on about “picking up hags,” but I began to get paranoid about Tim and Davo. All we ever did was smoke bongs and play Nintendo 64, I wondered why we never tried to meet any women. I thought I was in some poofter club and I was the only one who wasn’t in on t
he secret that we were all gay. I became paranoid about a lot of my friends. I also thought that Ben and Adam weren’t really my friends, that they thought I was lame. I never felt like I was cool, that’s why I wanted to be crazy so badly, because I thought it would make me cool.
I did see my friend Silk fairly regularly too, we went to school together as well, I didn’t see him as often as my other friends, but I used to go up to Katoomba to visit, we always got along well. He was living with this girl Priscilla, he had a child with her, Isaac, they’re not together any more, but I always got the impression she didn’t really like the way I’d always turn up with this huge sack of weed. Hanging out with Silk was always fun, he had a lot more friends than me, I always just hung around with the same few guys, but I saw his friends regularly enough that I became moderately well acquainted with some of them. The night Silk told me the name for his son was Isaac, I said “that’s a very Biblical name.” Silk was wearing this coloured stripey poncho thing, it could have been a jacket. I was sitting on the lounge looking up at him and for a moment I had a vision of him as Joseph with his technicolour dreamcoat and the ceiling light shining behind his head like a halo, standing there with arms outstretched like some sort of saint. I rubbed my eyes and removed the image from my mind, and I thought nothing more of it.
I started to smoke a lot more pot on my own, usually when I was at university I would just roll a joint and walk around the perimeter of the uni until it was finished and then come back into the uni grounds, I just thought it was better than having issues with uni security. Smoking on my own, it made me a little paranoid, and I began talking to myself a little.
Talking to myself started off as mumbling, I wanted to be like Hunter S Thompson in the movie of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ the way he mumbles things to himself all the time. The talking to myself, it got more and more pronounced over time, it went from mumbling, to talking, to singing. That’s right, singing, and I don’t mean humming some tune, I would walk around the university campus singing Tom Waits songs, and not quietly. I did this all the time, I would spend a lot of time at home memorising songs and then wander around the campus singing them as if I was alone. At the time I didn’t think it was that strange, I had always liked singing along with my CDs, but singing in public was something I really started to enjoy. I was proud that I had learned all the words to these great songs.
In the early days of talking to myself it was like I wanted to be crazy, it was as if I was pretending to be crazy because I thought it was cool to be crazy, but when I couldn’t stop I began to wonder if I really was crazy? I used to like singing at work at Coles too, I had a job there packing shelves in the middle of the night. In particular, I learned all the words for ‘Step Right Up’ by Tom Waits, it’s a song with a massive number of sales clichés, I loved singing that song at the supermarket the most.
I used to drive a friend of mine around in exchange for pot, I also used to drive to the Nepean River on my own a lot and smoke bongs in my car, and I began to think I was under surveillance because the cops thought I was a drug dealer. It seemed to me like this black Holden Commodore with tinted windows was following me around. I would see him behind me in the McDonalds drive-thru a lot, it seemed like wherever I went there was always this black Holden Commodore nearby. I never thought to check the number plate, and because of the tinted windows all I would ever see were the hands on the steering wheel, he made me think of the truck driver in the movie ‘Duel.’ All I ever saw were his hands as he followed me around at night, he was my nemesis. Of course it was completely paranoid.
When I saw the towers come down on September 11 of that year, I knew that it was the beginning of the end. We've witnessed much worse things than September 11 since 2001, but at the time I'd never seen anything like it. It shouldn't have been as big a deal as it was, it was the act of a small terrorist organisation and should have been treated as such, but that was the day that the world changed forever.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but September 11 affected me more than I knew. My brother Tom was only a few years old at the time, I remember watching him crashing his toy cars into the lounge and making explosion noises and thinking “that's pretty fucked up.” He must have seen that footage hundreds, if not thousands of times, like we all did.
A night or two after September 11, my friend Davo and I were doing our usual thing, driving around Penrith smoking cones, when Davo told me to stop the car. I pulled over to the side of the road and he pointed up into the sky, there were strange orange lights flying over Penrith, maybe about five or six of them. After the orange lights flew overhead they were followed by a helicopter. It was night time so we couldn’t see what was happening properly, but the helicopter seemed to be chasing after these orange lights. I thought maybe it was some sort of military exercise because of September 11, but those orange lights didn’t look like any sort of aircraft I’ve ever seen, nor did they make any sound. I’ve spent countless hours scanning the skies ever since, always hoping for something I can’t explain, but that’s the only time I’ve ever seen a ufo.
At university I began to think people were talking about me behind my back. I thought I could hear people say things like “he thinks he’s so cool, but all he does is smoke pot, really he's just a dickhead,” or “there goes that crazy guy.” There were a few occasions where people would start singing songs when they saw me coming. Maybe they just liked singing as well, I don’t know, but more likely they just wanted me to feel normal. Either that or they were poking fun. This people talking about me thing really started to get to me after a while, there was one time on the bus that I thought some people a few seats back were talking about me, “I have to know,” I decided. So I got up from my seat, I walked over to them and I asked “were you just talking about me?” They looked at me like they were confused. “Come on, you can tell me, I just need to know if you were talking about me?” They denied it, I pressed them again, and they denied it again. “Ok, sorry,” I said, and I sat back down convinced that they were lying. I had wanted to be crazy for years, and I thought I was only pretending to be crazy to make myself look cool, but my mind was slipping, I was actually becoming “that crazy guy.” I wasn’t pretending anymore, and it scared me.
My behaviour started to get crazier and crazier too. In particular, my driving was a little on the suicidal side. I always drove stoned, but I was usually more careful about the drinking. I would drive drunk on occasion though. Sometimes I’d go to the pub with Davo, and the plan was always to drive there and pick the car up in the morning, but after a few beers and joints we’d come out of the pub and say “let’s go for a drive!” The craziest driving I ever did was after a friend’s 21st in June of that year. I had gotten wasted at his party, the plan was to walk back home because it was only a few blocks away, but once again the “let’s go for a drive!” idea sounded good. So I went for a cruise, on my own, along the highway. I found out my car’s top speed that night, I was going 170km/h with my foot flat to the floor and cursing “doesn’t this fucking car go any faster than this?” I did a 180º spinout somewhere around St Marys. I ended up on the other side of the road facing the other way, “it’s time to go home,” I decided. That was pretty fast, it wasn’t the fastest I’ve ever been in a car, but it was the fastest I’d ever driven. I was heading for a breakdown.
Things came to a head at the end of third year university. I couldn’t take the madness anymore, it had started out as pretend but it was taking over my life. I was in my car in a car park where I used to smoke with Adam sometimes, and I sat there smoking cone after cone after cone. I was rambling on, “everyone thinks I’m crazy, they say ‘there goes that crazy guy,’ I fucking walk around talking to myself and singing to myself, I’m fucking insane! What the fuck is wrong with me?! If I’m pretending why can’t I stop?!” I went on like this for about half an hour, smoking, rambling, shouting at myself and bawling my eyes out. My life was empty and meaningless. I was beginning to realise that I h
ad no purpose, I had no life goals, I had no reason to exist. My philosophy was always to cruise through life doing the minimum work necessary for the maximum income, but it gave me no satisfaction. I wasn’t really talking to myself that day, someone else was in the car with me.
When I look back on that day I know that I wasn’t really alone. I could feel it at the time too, he or she or they said “You’re better than this, I’ll give you something to do, I’ll give you a reason to exist, I’ll show you what you’re really capable of!” Fumbling around that day in my car I burned my fingers badly on the conepiece, the red hot conepiece gave me blisters on my two index fingers and I had scars for months. Later I thought back to that day while looking at my fingers and I thought of ‘The Creation of Adam’ in the Sistine Chapel, where God’s fingers are touching Adam’s as He gives Adam the divine spark. I knew that I was losing my mind, but I didn’t know what was coming next, no one did.
My sister Katie meanwhile had become a born-again Christian, she was having a conversation with me one afternoon out the front of the house. She asked me “why don’t you believe in God?” I told her “it’s ridiculous, there’s a scientific explanation for everything.” She said “where did the universe come from?” I told her “the big bang, everyone knows that.” So she asked, “how does gravity work then? That’s proof of God.” She had me stumped, I didn’t know how gravity worked, I had never thought about it before. I didn’t consciously think about it after that, but she had started something in my subconscious, the wheels were in motion. Ideas were being conceived without my knowledge.
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