You might be wondering why I called you into my office...

John saw the flier for psychological test subjects on the Yale campus bulletin board a week ago. Easy money. A few hours out of the day and some spending cash in the back of your pocket. A good thing when your parents aren't footing the bills, but this was turning into something he didn't sign up for.

"Please continue.", buzzed the overhead speaker.

"Hey wait! Is that guy alright? Didn't you hear him screaming and banging on the walls?"

The intercom crackled, "The experiment requires that you continue."

John had already pushed the red button six times, once for every wrong answer the test subject gave. The first shock he applied was just a few volts, enough to get your attention. But for each wrong answer the voltage doubled.

"Hey, didn't you hear him say he had a heart problem? Can't you see the needle is pointing to red?!"

The first time he pressed the button, the subject let out an involuntary yelp. John pushed a laugh down into his gut imagining the guy's hair standing up like some cartoon character. Hell, it could have been him getting the electric shock treatment if he hadn't drawn 'tester'. John was lucky that way.

As the voltage doubled and doubled again with each incorrect answer, the brief yelps turned into shouts that increased in length and volume and intensity. When John applied the sixth shock, it issued an unrestrained scream that lasted several seconds after the juice was shut off.

"It is absolutely essential that you continue!", said the metallic voice.

"Look, I'll give the 50 dollars back OK? I don't need the money. Would you just tell me that guy is alright! Professor! Jesus Christ!""

John's chest pumped up and down, swallowing air in thick chunks. This wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth it.

"You have no other choice," The professor boomed through the intercom. "You MUST go on!"

John braced himself, expecting a scream that would spend years lurching and shambling inside his nightmares, but when he opened his eyes it was only the weight of silence pressing on his clammy skin and the scent of ozone fluttering in his nose.

The intercom squawked opened.

"Thank you for your time, John." smiled the voice through the speaker. "The experiment is over.", and the intercom went dead.

-- short untitled story, by Kevin

Soon after the war crimes trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Yale Psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to test the ability of subjects to perform unethical acts under the direction of an authority figure. The experiment, now known as the Milgram Experiment, was testing the veracity of the Nuremberg Defense where a defendant states "I was only following orders". Nobody was actually subjected to electric shocks, but an actor in another room made the experiment seem very realistic to the participants in the study.

Now, the idea that anyone could be manipulated to do anything under the direction of an authority figure is pretty frightening, but apparently someone thought the experiment didn't go far enough and proceeded to try their own anonymous Milgram experiments over the phone.

As strange as it sounds, a person posing as a police officer or company executive placed phone calls to several fast-food restaurants around the country including Taco Bell, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Ruby Tuesday and Applebee's and successfully persuaded managers to perform strip searches on employees.

Weirder still, the caller sometimes reversed the tables and convinced the managers into submitting to strip searches themselves administered by the same employees they had just finished examining. These occurrences continued for about a decade and came to be known as the Strip Search Prank Call Scam.

Freedom Fries

An American and a Chinese were arguing about their freedom to talk in their countries.

American : The Constitution gives us the freedom to shout that George W. Bush is an idiot right in front of the White House!

Chinese : Thats nothing. We can shout that George W. Bush is an idiot right in front of our president... and get a reward too!

It's getting near the 4th of July weekend, and I suppose I am reflecting on the idea of "Freedom" more than I normally would. I have met many amazing people but there are only a select few that I would consider free or whose pursuit of freedom manifested itself in ways that were interesting to me.

One person that comes to mind is Dr. Ala Bashir, former personal physician to Saddam Hussein and respected artist who also penned "The Insider", a book based on his experiences inside Iraq.

Dr. Bashir is tall and thin and possesses a stillness of character one usually associates with men of great spiritual discipline. He moves slowly and speaks with great thought and gentleness and his calmness creates a subtle magnetism that tugs you a little closer.

Dr. Bashir's relationship with freedom was something I witnessed during an exhibition of his art in New Haven, CT. Surrounding him were local real estate developers, magazine publishers, Yale professors and more than the fair share of the idle rich.

The showing featured works he painted during the Hussein regime and they are extraordinarily powerful in symbolism and dramatic use of primary reds, blues and greens. I often felt my breath involuntarily leave my lungs as I came upon one of his paintings in the gallery.

Surrounded by people bearing wine glasses and fruit plates, Dr. Bashir would introduce each painting, giving the audience the meaning of the symbols as he knew them and the circumstances under which he was inspired to paint them, which were usually in his dreams.

After Bashir spoke, the audience would ask many questions,

"Did you mean this when you painted it?", "Could the use of this symbol mean....", "Was this a political statement of...", "Do you believe in God?"

I say the audience asked questions, but the truth is most were statements disguised with a question mark, designed to aggrandize the intelligence of the speaker rather than a call for understanding and I silently suppressed many cringes as I listened.

To each question, Bashir would politely say no, I did not mean that, I did not mean this, I do not think this work shows I believe what you say, I do not feel that way. This painting was in my head, and I needed to paint it.

As I stood there with a glass of red wine and a pressed white shirt, it occured to me that as Dr. Bashir battled these attempts at philosophical rationalization of his art, he was actually engaging in a personal battle for his own freedom.

Instead of being surrounded by a group of wealthy Americans, it seemed to me that Dr. Bashir was in a sea of tiny dictators, each one saying "You must be this! You must think this! You must believe this! You must be what I believe you to be and nothing else, because I say it must be so!"

Bashir replies, "No."

I hope Dr. Bashir will forgive me if I imagine him thinking that the word 'no' is unique in all the world because it is only free men who can can speak it without fear.

Sometimes, we say it exactly right

When a person compliments an article or a short story, they often say "Nice piece".

Never, 'nice whole' or even "nice 9/16ths" because writing, even at it's best, can only capture a piece of a larger truth.

This smallness is both the beauty and the the ugliness of writing. The beauty is the attempt to create a truth in as few words as possible. The ugliness is in the utter futility of the exercise.

But, somewhere along the way, you become comfortable with this inherent inability to create a whole truth with pen and paper and come to embrace the 'lie by omission'.

Because if we couldn't make peace with the lie or the half-truth or the piece of the piece that isn't the whole truth then we couldn't write anything at all.

A world of blank pages may be more truthful, but infinitely more boring.

Slan Abhaile

I've spent three hours at the local pub writing in my journal. Soul searching I suppose. Among the brick-a-brack that adorns the walls of a typical Irish/American pub I noticed a black and white photograph of Brendan Behan, the famous Irish author of Borstal Boy. The photo was taken in 1953 at a Dublin bar. A pint of Guinness perched atop his portable typewriter, his hands blurred as his fingers flew above the keys. A man in a light colored coat was captured in the frame, in motion towards the bar getting a pint of his own.

When I saw that photo, I imagined a young man walking half way across Dublin lugging a portable typewriter under his arm so he could sit down in a busy pub to enjoy a pint as he wrote one of the most famous books in Irish literature. I heard the clack of the keys amidst the clink of pint glasses, the roar of laughter after a joke well told and the rustle of a paper being turned to the next news story.

Most people can't understand writing like that, in the middle of a busy pub with people bumping into you every time they pass by your seat, but I could. In fact, I can hardly write outside of a pub. When I saw that picture I felt like I knew Brendan in a way most people couldn't and I wished he was there at the end of the bar with his typewriter so I could hear the click of the keys and I would buy him as many rounds as he could drink and if he couldn't walk straight as he left the pub I would carry his typewriter home for him, if he asked me to, because I understood him. I am a pub writer just like he was.

And it was the way my father wrote too though he stopped after I was born. Neither of us had any idea genes could carry such information. I never saw him writing in a pub.

I lost my journal last weekend so I'm here beginning a new one. The journal was begun when I moved to Boston and it had over six months of memories written in it's pages but I do not believe it is any great loss at all. It was a simple story anyway. Me running away from the ghosts of a failed relationship and into the arms of a city that promised to help me forget. If ghosts had feet I might have gotten away from those bastards but we all know ghosts are not killed by drinking, fucking or driving far way from them. Still, doesn't stop you from trying.

I know what I'm saying is more than the sum of these words and these excuses or these ghosts lying around me like handkerchiefs. What I'm trying to say is something about Brendan and his typewriter and how I wrote poems on bar napkins over a pint just as my father did and it's about a lost journal of no great loss about a promised land called Boston where ghosts are not allowed to cross the borders but they do and how being alone in New Haven is really the same as being alone in Boston but you just have less people around you to share it with.

It's about me helping Brendan through the streets of Dublin with his typewriter tucked safely underneath my arm.

-- Caoimghgin
-- 08FEB06