All right. Here we go again.

My counselor once told me that I was a journalist. She said, "You're a journalist, Thomas!" When I was talking to her about all of these things that I find interesting, she said, "You're a journalist." To me, this was intriguing and I was also like, "What? No I'm not, I don't work for a newspaper or a media company or whatever it is that journalists are supposed to do." But I understand now that a profession is more than just the social qualifications that go with it. You don't need a special piece of paper or a title on your business card or a special badge or whatever it is in order to be a journalist or anything else. It actually is just what it says on the label if you look at the word.

On Victor's blog, on the main page, he has a sentence that resonated with me because it said, "journalists journal, that's all it takes to be a journalist." I really liked that, because being able to qualify yourself through the action and not other people's perceptions makes it a lot easier and more accessible to do the work that needs to be done. I think that some of the best journalists today are citizen journalists. The idea of what a journalist should be has been distorted over time to be far away from what one actually is.

I heard somewhere that back in the early 20th century, a journalist was a very blue-collar profession, and there was a huge mindset of it being like the working man's "fuck you" to the system by keeping people in power accountable by making everybody aware of what's going on. "Breaking Story! Huge Corruption Within the Cabinet!" or something along those lines. I remember this being communicated by how journalists would talk to one another in informal settings, how their editors would have to go through and redact a lot of the language that was being used because they would be unapologetic and scathing. They'd be like, "Oh, these motherfuckers think they can do this and that, but they really can't! We're gonna expose them!"

I think somebody mentioned that the old journalists were a part of the groups that would be protesting some kind of institutional action, throwing rocks from the outside, whereas the journalists today, or a lot of them, at least, are inside the institutions and alongside power, and sort of being megaphones for the powerful in a lot of cases. I think you can see this in the incestuous elitism that's present at things like the White House Press Correspondents' Dinner, or whatever it's called, where you have all of these highfalutin people from their fancy media company jobs at CNN or whatever sitting around fancy tables eating fancy food alongside people in the government.

That's not what journalism is really about, in my opinion, and it's not what it used to be about. It's about being on the outside of the Correspondents' Dinner and throwing rocks, saying, "Hey! You think you're all that? Nah! I'll show you what you are, you're just somebody who thinks they're better than the rest of us for one reason or another." In reality it's all just labels, labels and people's perceptions. All that to say that a journalist is somebody who journals, and I guess that's what I'm doing.

Victor suggested when he learned in the Gulag that I only had one eye--I made mention of it and he wasn't aware. He's like "hey, cyclops!" I love that--that I make an account of everything regarding my story about, I suppose, the cancer, the loss of the eye. "You should write up your story" is what he said. "Please consider writing a detailed account."

When I talked to him a few days before, when he said "I love the way you write!" and I'm like, "I spoke, I didn't write." He's like, "Well, then I'm not a writer." I realized that writing is about the process of composition, not about the method. I suppose if I find it more comfortable to do it verbally than to type it up on a keyboard, the effect is still the same after it's been translated. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to tell my story, and it is interesting, or at least I think it's interesting. It's certainly unusual.

So when I was very young, around the age of 5, I suppose, I mentioned to my mom one or several times that there were issues when I was seeing with my right eye. I remember describing it as "I can see in the middle, and then everything is black around the outside," or "dark around the outside." Something like that. What I was describing was tunnel vision. She's expressed later when I've spoken to her about this what I detect as regret that she didn't take it more seriously, but I also don't blame her, because I was a kid, and not only was I a kid, I was a kid who would frequently pretend to be sick in order to get out of going to school, or to get some objective. I think what she told me she thought is that because I had recently become friends with somebody who wore glasses and I liked them or something like that, she thought that I was exaggerating vision problems or something along those lines in order to get glasses. That wasn't the case, but it was a very reasonable guess. If you'd known me as a child, you would not blame her.

So, anyway, I would do things that were a bit unusual. I remember that when I would read something, what I would do is I would put my right elbow on the surface next to the book and I would cover my right eye, I would lay my head in my hand and I would cover my right eye with my hand. I didn't know why I did this when I read, I didn't even think about it, but it's obvious in retrospect that it's because it assisted with my vision, my ability to read. And the reason for this is because I had a tumor behind my eye that we didn't know about.

You can see in photographs of me when I was as young as maybe like 4 or even 3 that there was a slight difference on my right eye, it's almost unnoticeable, though. The only time that it was noticed was when I was taken to our family doctor when I was 7 years old for an ear infection. And I remember that this was an ear infection that I had made up to get out of school, so there you have it. But it ended up being a good thing that I did, because my doctor noticed that my right eye was protruding a little bit and thought that it was unusual.

I remember that they took measurements and eventually what happened is that I got a CAT scan, and the CAT scan showed that there was a tumor behind my eye. Based on all the evidence that they had, I think the medical conclusion was that the most likely thing it was was something called a "hemangioma," which I don't remember exactly what that is, but I believe it has something to do with blood clotting. But anyway, that's what they thought that it was, it was some kind of benign, non-spreading thing.

I had surgery done in order to have it removed. I had the surgery done at a very good place in New York City. We were probably only like an hour away from it when we lived in the Northeast, and my doctor--I had a plastic surgeon who was doing the surgery to remove the tumor--he was a really cool guy. I remember talking to him as a kid, and he was always very happy to explain things and answer questions. Really kind, very, very smart.

During the surgery, there was a point--because they made an incision somewhere to the right of my eye in order to remove the tumor, and of course, there's part of your skull there, and you also have an eyeball--they needed to remove this large tumor. If I remember correctly, it was almost as large as my eyeball was, which is pretty big, and he wasn't able to get it out. So he called for a surgical assistant to go get a bone saw so that he could cut some bone to remove the tumor, because he didn't have space. In the interim period, as the surgical assistant was going to get a bone saw, he managed to get it out without it, and so there was no need to cut into the bone.

This turned out to be a blessing that may have saved my life, because after a biopsy was done, they discovered that the tumor was not a hemangioma. It was, in fact, a very rare, aggressive form of cancer called "mesenchymal chondrosarcoma," and if cancer cells had gotten into my bone or bone marrow, there's a good chance that from there it could have metastasized throughout my body, or at least that's how I remember it being told. All I know is that it's a miracle that the inside of my bone did not have to be exposed to these aggressive cancer cells.

After this was discovered, there was a decision that had to be made, and that was what to do as treatment. Of course, being 7 at the time, around my 8th birthday, I wasn't going to make this decision. It was up to my parents, my legal guardians. They had to make the decision of how, medically, to treat the area, to decide what was to be done about the cells that would have remained in the area. They had a few choices. They could have done nothing. This would have undoubtedly have left cancer cells in the area, and it would be overwhelmingly likely, I'm sure, that they would divide and grow into a new tumor or multiple tumors. They could have me undergo chemotherapy in order to try and deal with the remaining cancer cells, free radicals, whatever. What the doctors advised was to have my right orbit removed, so to have my eye and a lot of things in my eye socket removed, everything that would have had the cancer cells on it.

How does a parent make that decision? When I think back to everything that happened, it was actually very easy for me to go through all of this. I didn't have to make any difficult decisions. I essentially got a vacation from school, and that's really how I saw it, how I experienced it. The severity of this type of cancer was very serious. I think it was extremely well-known for killing the people that had it due to just how aggressive it was, and my parents, not wanting me to die, decided to do both. To have my right eye removed, and to have me go through chemotherapy.

There was a particular event from this period of time that I remember very distinctly. It was when my parents told me that I was going to lose my right eye. I remember the circumstances it took place in. We had a house where the living room and dining room were adjacent to one another. I was in the living room, they were both sitting on chairs in the dining room. They said something along the lines of, "Thomas, you're going to have to have your eye removed," or, "You're going to have to lose your eye," or something like that. All three of us just began to sob. I don't remember if I cried because they were crying or because I learned that I had to lose part of myself, but I cried really hard for about 30 seconds. But then, after that, it felt like something came over me. I don't know what it was, but it was like I was receiving comforting thoughts from somewhere. So I stopped crying, and I stood there and I thought for a moment. I'm pretty sure I told my parents something along the lines of, "Mommy, daddy, it's okay. I'll still be the same old Thomas, I'll just have one eye, that's all." They just continued to sob and cry because they knew that I'd have to live the rest of my life with only one eye. I was thinking about it, too, I was thinking that it would be me, but I would be missing my right eye. I would only have one eye. That would just be the new me. I went up to them, and I remember hugging them. I was comforting them. I was trying to comfort them because they were crying! It felt like some supernatural force was giving me strength in that moment. This is one of my most prominent memories from that time period.

They did the surgery to remove my right orbit, there's a name for it that I can't remember, it's like "right occipital something," and then I went through something like a 5- or 6-month period of chemotherapy. Every two weeks or so I would go to a children's hospital and receive something like 3-5 days of chemotherapy. My hair all fell out for a while. I actually started wearing glasses for a little while not because I had vision issues, but for protection, because when you only have one eye, it's reasonable to be a bit more cautious about protecting the last eye that you have. Having one eye, in my opinion, is a lot better than having no eyes. You can still see. You still receive almost all of the benefits of vision with some minor setbacks, which are the lack of some peripheral vision and the lack of depth perception. Depth perception in our vision really only works up to a range of like 50 feet in front of us or something along those lines, which is helpful, because most things that we engage with are within 50 feet of us, but, for example, when you're driving, I find that it isn't that big of a deal. At least not for me, but that could also be because I've never driven under any circumstances except only having one eye. I've been told it's quite challenging when you try to do it and you have two.

I went through chemotherapy in New York City, and believe it or not, I loved this. The reason that I loved this is because I didn't have to go to school. I hated school as a kid. I still kind of do. It depends on the circumstances. I've always loved to learn, but I've always hated school. I can probably put it better into words today than I could have back then--well, I absolutely can.

Having had so many years to think it over, I think that it's because school, or the way that our educational system is designed, is not designed to encourage a passion for learning. It is designed to enforce certain social behaviors that will allow people to be consistent, stable members of a productive workforce. I think that this originates back in Prussia. There was a Prussian general that designed the original model that our educational system today in western civilization is based upon. The way that school is structured largely mirrors what your experience will be once you're in the workforce. You're inside an authoritarian structure where the objective is to meet a certain level of performance quality and quantity. You're given assignments, and then you perform those assignments. Based on how well you perform those assignments, you're given a grade, which is supposed to reflect your intellectual quality or perhaps your work ethic. I'm sure that there's information somewhere out there on what grades themselves are actually supposed to reflect. Maybe not necessarily the intelligence of the person, but how willing they are to do all of the things that they're told to do to the extent that they're told to do them and how competent they are at doing those things. In our economy, in order to perform a large number of our most important productive tasks, you need to be a highly educated person.

All this diatribe about why I don't like schools is to say that I was very happy. I didn't know why as a kid, but I just hated school, and I was ecstatic that instead I got to lay in a hospital bed and play video games. Which at this point in my life, I now realize may have been better education than the school itself. I did have a tutor. I still learned things that are fundamental, like mathematics, literacy, those sorts of things. But I got to play video games in my hospital room, which I thought was just great. It was like a 9-month vacation. I had this little screen on my GameCube that you could flip up on top of it and you could see the game on it. It was like a little portable television screen.

I think that this is part of why video games have become an integral part of my life that really actually matter quite a lot to me. They've been an important part of my entire life ever since I was a kid and I would play with my brother all the time. It was just always something that I'd done not just to entertain myself, but also to enjoy challenging myself. When you play video games, there's a lot of learning involved, but it's not inside of that authoritarian structure. You're given complete freedom to explore the world that you're put into and learn about it and interact with it in different ways depending on what it is that you think will work.

So, I went through chemotherapy and I really handled it quite well, all things considered. I'm very lucky in many respects. Not only am I lucky that I'm alive and that the treatments worked and that I've been in remission for almost 21 or 22 years--I think closer to 21 since I was diagnosed cancer-free--but that the chemotherapy hasn't had any serious lasting effects on me that I know of. I am, for all intents and purposes, aside from missing an eye, physically normal.

There is one thing that I know I have to keep in mind. The way that chemotherapy works is that they use your heart--or at least the way that I had it done--they use your heart to pump the, effectively poison, throughout your body. It's supposed to be a selective poison that doesn't kill off all of your cells. I guess I can't tell you exactly how it works, but I know that there's different chemotherapies for different cancers. The one that I had, there was no specific chemotherapy protocol for mesenchymal chondrosarcoma. I believe the one that they used was one for what's called a Ewing sarcoma, and that was considered the best treatment. This would have been in 2002.

They put a port in on my chest and it used my heart to pump it through my body, so I know that as I get older, it's wise to pay attention to my heart. As far as I know, that's really the only side effect I might have. I might also be sterile, but I have no idea about that.

I think this event really altered the course of my life. I can't say that for sure, because obviously, I'm not an omniscient god that knows all multiverse timelines, but I was exposed to something that was similar to self-education at this time period. I did have a tutor, but largely what I was doing was working from books with her guidance. I did return to public school. I returned to public school near the end of the 3rd grade. I left in the middle of 2nd grade.

It was in 4th grade that I learned about homeschooling! What? What's this? You don't have to go to school? You can learn everything you need to at home and you're allowed to do that? This is something I became obsessed with because I hated school. It was not fun, there were people always telling me what to do. I wasn't exactly a huge social butterfly, but socialization is an important--in fact, maybe the most important part of participating in the public school system is going through certain experiences when it comes to interacting with people and learning why people behave certain ways, different personality types, who you can trust, who you can't, why people form cliques, groups, those sorts of things. If you don't go, you miss out on a lot of that, and I would consider that to be the most important part of education in the public education system to be a functional member of society.

I went through 4th grade and then 5th grade in the public education system, and then, after my family moved to the Midwest for financial reasons, it was an opportunity to do this homeschooling thing, which my parents agreed to. In retrospect, I think that I probably received a higher quality education in terms of the actual things that I learned being homeschooled than I may have if I had been in the public school system. I essentially had to train myself to be an autodidact, which means "self-teacher" as far as I understand the word. I used books for a few years with the mix-in of some computer programs that were decided on and set up by my parents. They brought me to gatherings where other kids that were homeschooled would interact with each other, and that's how I met my best friend that I still know today. They really did an amazing job dealing with an antisocial brat like me.

I used books for a few years and then I moved on to a computer system that had scheduled assignments and was constructed by professionals and designed for the purpose of homeschooling in the United States. That is what I used throughout all of my high school. A computer program that I used to learn everything that you are supposed to learn in high school. Mathematics, literature, chemistry, those sorts of things. History.

I still didn't like it. I didn't like being told what to learn. I'd just as soon as play video games all day and not do anything that would help shape me into an educated, functional member of society, but I did. I graduated and did not go to college, but instead worked at my dad's business for a few years where I learned so much.

I guess while I'm going, since I'm essentially recapping the events throughout my life, I might as well continue.

I really enjoyed working at my dad's business. I became proficient in accounting, customer relations, inventory management, shipping, graphic design. That was fun. When I was 19, my dad sent me to a training class in Oklahoma, which was very nerve-wracking, but I did make it through it, to learn how to use Photoshop. While I learned quite a bit about it there, enough to get me started, where I became good at it was using it for fun to edit images to make jokes or funny things throughout the years and learned to use new tools on my own. I did some graphic design work for the company. Got to learn about raster and vector graphics. Photoshop only uses raster graphics, or at least the version of it that I used did. I still got to learn about how to use some software like Illustrator and CorelDRAW for simple things. I had a lot of fun at that job.

I left because I felt like it was damaging relationships that were important to me, and I was very young and didn't know what I was doing and a lot of the time thought that I knew what I was doing anyway. There was a period of time where I was sort of the on-site relay for the CEO, and while I didn't make important executive decisions, there were times when it felt like those sorts of things were falling to me. At the age that I was, very, very young 20s and with the lack of experience in business, relatively--like what, three years of learning the fundamentals?--I really wasn't qualified for that, and it just strained relationships that were important to me.

That's when I began to learn how painful it is to not feel like you have a purpose in the world. When I was employed there and receiving a paycheck, I had something to do regularly that kept me on a good sleep schedule. It was quote-unquote "productive" and gave me a sense of accomplishment. I was learning new things. I was getting social interaction. It all felt very healthy for me as an individual.

That's not to say that the work that was being done or the industry in general was a healthy thing for the world. There are some twisted incentives in the business that I was in, which was essentially arms wholesale and manufacturing. When I see these wars happening around the world and these massive amounts of money that are being spent on them, I know who's on the other side of that receiving that money and why it is in their interest to have these wars. People in a state of war are willing to pay a lot of money for things in order to defend themselves or to attack the enemy, and the margin between that and what it costs to manufacture those items is incredibly huge. There are a lot of people in the middle who make money. It's not just the manufacturers, it's also the people who negotiate the sales, the people purchasing them on the other side in foreign countries. So when like 100 billion dollars gets put towards arming a country overseas, where that money really goes is to our arms manufacturers and other profiting parties. It's a system of incentives built on fear and violence. Fear of the other and people's willingness to buy into that, and the solution of that fear through violence that gets amplified by people whose interests it's in to manufacture, sell, and profit from these things.

That's why Eisenhower warned about it in his farewell address, of the military-industrial-complex's danger of subverting our democratic principles.

What we did was almost entirely domestic. We did very little in international transactions. There was one very large one, we purchased a large amount of ammo from a country in the Balkans, which they overpowdered and built completely incorrectly. But it was for the most part domestic sales, wholesale. Later on we did retail, and that was fun.

So, for a couple years I wondered, "What am I going to do?" Because this is America. You gotta do something. You can't just sit there and play video games and jerk off. You're not contributing to the economy. You're not fulfilling your end of the social contract that you never agreed to but are having forced upon you. I suppose you can reject the social contract by saying, "No, I'm not going to do this," but at the same time, it feels like a moral failing to push the burden of producing all of the things that make our state of modern living possible--our infrastructure, our services--onto the rest of society and yourself saying, "I simply don't want to do that, so I'm not going to." There's this internal drive to, or at least there was for me, to do something productive. To learn a skill, to do a job, to get a paycheck, and spend that money on survival necessities and the remainder on whatever you want.

I ended up deciding after a couple of years that I wanted to go and learn how to be a court reporter. I found it fascinating. It was something you could do for money, and it seemed to fit with things that I was very interested in at the time, which are things that involve using your hands. I've loved to play the piano since I was around 8 years old, and I'd recently discovered how much I loved to type after learning how to touch type properly. Using a stenotype machine seemed like it was along those lines, and I was actually right.

I ended up going to study to be a court reporter, and there's a fascinating amount of theory and execution behind using a stenotype machine. It's really a lot like a combination between typing and playing an instrument. I'd say it's closer to playing an instrument than it is to typing, but it is an incredibly fascinating theory. I would describe it as an art, actually. Taking all of the phonetic sounds and expressing them through combinations of keys in order to make words and phrases, how to best mentally organize those combinations of keys to fit with the way that you think and express things quickly, efficiently. That's the objective, is to record speech at the speed that humans speak.

After I learned StenEd, which is the predominant theory in stenography world on a stenotype machine, and basically felt that it was incredibly inefficient, went and relearned a new theory called Magnum by a guy named Mark Kislingbury. I ended up making a whole bunch of my own modifications. Any professional stenotype user has their own variations on whatever the direct theory of how to make certain sounds, words, and phrases. They have their own variations on it that fit with their style.

I realized that this was a dying field, unfortunately. It was not fulfilling at all. What was fulfilling for me was learning the theory and figuring it out. Creating different beginnings and endings on the stenotype machine for different phonetic beginnings or endings of words and then turning them into dictionary entries and using them in order to transcribe speech.

I got pretty fast at it. I was able to do transcription of material that wasn't too difficult or dense at around 140 words per minute, with the more difficult stuff ranging from 100 to 120. Which is not nearly as fast as you need to be in order to pass your qualification tests to be a professional court reporter, but I didn't want to be a court reporter.

I didn't want to be sitting at a deposition or next to a judge and just doing the same repetitive thing over and over again. Taking down speech, transcribing it and turning it into a transcript or paying somebody else to turn it into a transcript. Just making a living. Having a comfortable life, I guess. It sounded very unfulfilling and boring.

I spent all of my savings that I had saved up from working to go learn a skill set that I never put to professional use, and then came and lived back home. I went back into that state of wanting to be productive, but not knowing what to do, which is where I've been for the past 6 years.

Except a lot has changed about me over the course of those 6 years. I haven't gone into any formal institutions, but I have learned a whole lot about things that I am passionate about through the Internet. History, civilization, politics, economics, ideologies, cultures, conspiracy theories and how they relate to the modern zeitgeist.

Currently, the general public is not operating off a truthful set of information. I say this with great confidence. I believe that is the issue of our time. The difference between what is true and what people think is true. Behind it is probably the greatest crime story in human history.

The people that are doing the work to tell that story are the journalists who do research in the nooks and crannies where very few people take the time to look, and then put it together and present it to people on the Internet in a comprehensible fashion. That's gradually breaking down the wall of illusion of what it is that we think is true, and more and more people have been convinced to take a look in those dark places and second-guess themselves.

I think it's a Mark Twain quote that goes, "It's far easier to fool a man than to convince him that he's been fooled." This is incredibly true.

If I hadn't had cancer, been homeschooled, relatively socially isolated, and had gone down a very unusual path that didn't involve the constant pursuit of what it is that we're told to want--which is a college degree so that we can enter the workforce with a skill set that will be valuable enough to provide us with a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle where we will proceed to do our 9-5 until retirement--I was blasted out of that paradigm and into my own, bizarre story that involves the circumvention of so many different social norms.

At this point I do largely identify with Internet culture, this sort of global Internet culture, more than anything. Young people today, I think are very thoughtful, silly, open, but also largely despondent. When you do look at the state of things, the result of, essentially, unchecked corporatism, you see a world that tells you that your only purpose is to sit in a cubicle or something along those lines.

It reminds me of the scene from Rick and Morty where there's a little robot who is at the dinner table and passes butter to people, or something like that, it may have been slicing bread. He asks Rick or somebody, "What is my purpose?" and then Rick says, "Your purpose is to pass the butter," and then, dejectedly, he goes, "Oh my god," and he leans over in a sort of despair at the realization that he's just a cog in a machine to serve somebody else. No sense of self-determination.

I feel very fortunate that I've been brought to a place where I feel like I do get to experience self-determination. Through the support of people that care about me, I'm able to live the great luxury of spending my time contributing in a voluntary sense. Doing work because you believe in it, in what it's meant to accomplish, and not because you're trying to obtain some material reward in exchange for it is one of the most fulfilling things I can imagine, and how I hope to spend the rest of my life exerting myself, wherever it is that I end up doing so.

That's my story. There are a lot of other things about me, details about various things, but in essence, I feel like that captures my identity. I'm a very fortunate, self-determined young man who has one eye and is passionate about the structures that make the world work. What they are and how we contribute to them and how we can examine that relationship to better serve ourselves and our fellow human beings.

So that's Thomas.