I cheated once in college. It was my senior year. Arts 310, I think it was called? A core requirement, unrelated to my major. I was just cramming it in to tick the box en route to walking. The teacher was a mild narcoleptic Humpty-Dumpty-shaped man named Duane. He taught so gently you hardly noticed. Philosophy professor. Had a round head and a bursting fringe of curly black hair. I have no idea what that class was about. It occurs to me now Kenny was in it, too—Kenny who, when healthy, was the tallest person on a basketball court in America.
He wasn’t often healthy. Too tall. One time, when I was working at the campus convenience store, he bought several pounds of snacks and liters of Gatorade. I went for a bag and he said, in basso profundo, “Don’t need a bag,” and scooped up the lot into his colossal hands. In 310 he revealed that his real love wasn’t basketball but documentary filmmaking. I have since often wondered how frustrating it must be to go through life in America as a nearly 8-foot tall black man wanting to be a documentary filmmaker. Every single person you meet saying “Basketball, am I right?”
My first excuse is: I was busy. I was a very busy college senior. I was publishing metabolism (lit rag) and directing a play (for credit) and applying to prestigious grad schools (fail) and working at that convenience store (got fired) and wooing Arielle Carlson (for the win!).
My second excuse is that the idea I had for my essay was too good. I told Duane that for my final paper—the capstone project for the class—I wanted to write about thought. Specifically, I wanted to explore the biochemical origins of a person’s thoughts. For example: we think ourselves into will, into motion; we think: Thirst / move hand / take glass / drink water. Thought precedes virtually every action, but it cannot precede itself. What, then, is the unmoved mover of consciousness? This was the task I set before myself. Duane looked upon me gently and nodded.
I believe in procrastination. I don’t know how many other things I actively believe in (kindness, salt, service dogs, you can’t be sad and singing at the same time, every hotel room should have Kleenex…) but about procrastination I can affirmatively state, Yes, that is a central tenet of my “belief system.”
There have been studies. Students who fail to procrastinate write worse papers. This is thought to be the case because your first idea usually isn’t your best. Your best idea arises from a deep well of idleness, in the eleventh hour, after extensive mulling and avoidance and false starts. (If she were smart, Arielle would use this argument against me when I get annoyed with her for going through a million iterations of every plan. Since she is smart, I can only assume that my irritation isn’t important enough to her to bother with. And I do see her point.)
So I had my good (really too good) idea and diligently set about not working on it. If you are rooting for me, you might be thinking: Well, luckily Devin’s really good at science and he was probably a psych or biology major or something and it’s OK that he’s not taking this responsibility seriously because he’s probably totally surrounded by extremely smart sciency and psych types who will help him out when the chips are down. But in fact I had at that time about as much scientific aptitude as a piece of sidewalk curb. I was majoring in literature with an emphasis in creative writing, fairly routinely drunk and happily immured in a predominantly right-brained social set. I didn’t know the first thing about brains or minds or chemistry. I’d taken Psych 101 at Austin Community College years prior but all I could remember is that the teacher wore bright pink shorts one time and another time he told us that the best way to get someone to like you was to ask them to do you a favor (which, it occurs to me now, is rather opportunistic of my memory). I’d taken Biology at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College (‘cause I had to take one science class and I figured better at community college than university) and what happened was, the professor—a first-timer—went from insisting that she wouldn’t grade on a curve to grading on an aggressive curve because otherwise she’d have had to fail her entire class.
When I finally got around to actually having to come up with the paper, my folly was instantly, hilariously plain. The subject was opaque. And not just to me. There was no substantial agreement about what even constituted a thought, much less what triggered one. The only elucidating detail I unearthed was a bit from the philosopher David Chalmers, who, in 1995, described the difficulty inherent in explaining why it feels like something to be conscious:
What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? (Italics in original—Chalmers, 1995)
My idea was so good, it had a famous name! The Hard Problem! I threw my hands up in the air. “The” fucking “Hard Problem!”
I’ll admit it’s an imperfect parallel: what-triggers-thought is not the same question as why-does-it-feel-like-something-to-be-conscious. But it felt ballparky to me. And maybe I was looking for an excuse to think the unthinkable. If my idea was impenetrable to the best minds in the field, who was I to even try? Where did I get off? What gave me the nerve?
I resolved to cheat.
This is true: I’d heard on an episode of This American Life that when the producers invited people to call in and leave messages confessing to sins, tons of people admitted to cheating in college. Ira Glass said something along the lines of, Apparently tons of you cheated in college. I comforted myself with this truth.
You did it, too!
I found an online college essay-mill and bought a six- or seven-page piece an anthropology student somewhere had written about monkeys. Then I rewrote some sections and added some stuff and just generally sexed it up. Then I put my goddamn name on it, printed it out and turned it in. Got an A-.
I saw Duane downtown recently. He’d lost weight in the intervening 17 years. His hair was still bushy and wild, now gray. He was wearing these sort of coverall pajamas and drinking beer in the afternoon. He didn’t remember me. Was I tempted to confess to him, you ask? Would it feel good to get that off your chest, you wonder? (And what does it even mean, you ask yourself, to believe in salt?) I wasn’t tempted, no, and I didn’t confess. It strikes me now that it would’ve been kind of a shitty thing to do. “Guess what, Duane? 17-years ago I cheated in your class. How about that?” Some sins a person maybe shouldn’t confess—at least not to the one sinned against.
(Though I suppose that is a legal question, and an interesting one—who the wronged party was, I mean. It wasn’t only Duane. It was the entire University. It was also me I wronged, because in cheating I stole from myself the opportunity to learn. It was my mom and dad, who were heavily subsidizing my education. It was Kenny! I wronged Kenny by not taking seriously the class we were enrolled in together. It was North Carolina, who’d awarded a prized in-state status for tuition purposes to a transplanted Texan who turned out to be an academic fraud. I wronged my future wife and her entire family by laying this landmine in my bachelors degree. I wronged everybody! I’m living a lie!)
Why am I talking about it now? I’ve finally decided to make a clean breast of things, that’s why.
And speaking of clean breasts: I was taking a shower a few hours ago and thinking and I said to myself, aloud: “I wonder what Neils Bohr would make of the Hard Problem?” That thought triggered another, which triggered another, and they concatenated in my mind, ineluctably, indescribably, a small but weighty loadshifting of thought—like when you’re driving and you forget there’s something heavy in the back and you take a turn too quickly—
—and suddenly I’d decided to quit mucking around and start a Substack.
Everyone else is doing it, why not me? What makes me so special? Why not join something for once, you prick? Why go on pretending that writerly success is going to find you while doing next to nothing to seek it out? Why not make something of yourself for once instead of waiting for someone else to do it?
So here we are.
I’m going to try and post something twice a month. Content to vary—widely. My hope is that you enjoy what I write, that you subscribe, that you share recklessly, and that we embark here on many stimulating conversations. I’m going with free for now but I want you to know I’m conflicted about that.
I also want you to know that I love you and I’m thinking about you, even if I can’t describe where the thoughts come from or why it feels the way it does to have them.
Talk soon! And happy Mother’s Day!
This is some of the best sitting on ass reading I've ever experienced.