"I was involved in an experiment. Did I ever tell you about the experiment? I got $1000. I sat in a room for nine days with no windows, no television, no phone. They hooked me up to a computer. They kept asking me how my food was. So I always, I just had a little [indiscernable]. Ah, and they kept me awake. They didn't tell me, I didn't know what time it was. I didn't know what day it was. They kept me awake, and how they did it, it was at, ah, Beth Israel hospital and Northeastern medical students came in, and they had to keep me awake. I started dozing off. And they also, this was kind of bad, they wanted, uh, the effect of light on people, and sleep deprivation, so there was just enough light to read for those days that they kept me awake. And I sat there and they came in and asked me all types of questions, and kept me awake, and one of them asked me a question. He said, Why is the [indiscernable]. They came in after I'd been awake about 40 hours and she said, I have a question. Don't you want to know what time it is? [indiscernable] So I said, what kind of question is THAT? I don't want to know. I said, No, I don't want to know, quite frankly. I turned around and said, What does time mean? How can you measure time? And she said, Uh, what? And I said, Well, what did we do before clocks? I said, The farmers in the fields, right, they did it by seasons. They didn't do it by second and minute. I said, This is all a product of the Industrial Revolution. [indiscernable] I had a captive audience there, yeah, I said, Go into Lowell or Lawrence, what do you see in the middle of the factory, a giant clock! Before that time, people didn't say, Oh, I, I got a lunch break at 6:12, no, they didn't say, I have to be in work at 6:15 or I'll be in trouble. This is all a part of the Industrial Revolution. So I said to her, I said, What is time, anyways? Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, it all gets back to Sunday again, and it just keeps going over and over. So I threw a kind of philosophical question at her, and she didn't, she didn't like it too much. So I turned it around on her. She asked the wrong question. [student asks 'How long did you stay awake?'] The first time I stayed awake for 50 hours, and, uh, I couldn't wait to go to sleep, but then, of course, if you've ever stayed awake that long, when it's time to go to sleep, sometimes it's hard, uh, and then I kept thinking, if they were going to make me stay awake again, so I really didn't go to sleep, and the next one I couldn't sleep at all. But apparently I fell asleep. 50 hours the first time, and they told me afterwards, I got to see the chart. I was 'x' or whatever over 'y' on the, uh, on the equation. And then the second time I stayed awake for 31 hours. That was a piece of cake compared to the 50. I read three books, I, uh, I did a lot of stuff. I talked to a lot of interesting people, I played some checkers, uh, and some chess. A free thousand dollars. It's easy money. Except for the one incident I had. Uh, because, they put these electrodes to your head, I don't know if anybody's ever had this, but, uh, these little plate things, they stick them to your head. And, they wanted me to, this was part of the experiment, while they're keeping me awake, they want me to sit in the chair and stare at one thing on the wall, and they were measuring my, that moment when you fall asleep, they had all kinds of different studies, that moment when you fall asleep and it's like someone throwing a basketball at your face, that ever happen to you, and you jump like this, that ever happen to you when you fall asleep? They were measuring that. So, that was over, that took six hours. Then after that, I was still walking around the room with this thing stuck to my head, and it was like five thousand dollars worth of equipment, they kept telling me, Don't drop it. And so I called up and I said, I didn't call up, I was on camera the whole time, actually. Oh, I didn't tell you that. I said, can you come in. [indiscernable] I said, I'm going home. They said, You can go home at any time! Right, it's an experiment, you get something like a hundred dollars a day, but if you last the whole time, you get an extra three hundred dollars. So the guys came in and they told me stories that, you know, after a while some people start to lose it after three or four days sitting in a room with no windows and no access to the outside world. I didn't really lose it. I said, I'm going home. Take this off my head. I said, This has been on my head too long. They sat me down, and they said, You know, this is an experiment. And if you leave now, I can't use your data, right. But he was a student, so I felt kind of bad for him, so I said, Okay. Take this off my head. He said, You don't have that much longer to go. Then you'll get the extra money. I said, That's not about money. I said, It's about my well-being, psychologically and physically. Money doesn't mean anything. I wasn't really doing it for the money. I was doing it to see if I could sit in a room for nine days. [indiscernable] sitting in a room that long. So I was going to the Peace Corps in a couple of months, and I figured, if I can sit in this room for nine days straight, with no newspapers, plus I didn't have to talk to anybody, my family could not contact me, it was great. And, uh, I said, if I can do that, then I can sit in a village for two years, it won't be a problem. So I put myself through that test. And I got through. Uh, oh, I was talking about the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, because I hear they had the camera on me, and they keep me awake, after what, 40 hours, I had my Constitution out and I was citing, this is cruel and unusual punishment, this is unconstitutional, I demand to see a lawyer, so you have a little bit of fun with those people."

Then, he continued class as if nothing had ever happened.

My apologies for the indiscernable parts. Either the entire class was laughing and he talked through the laughter (he usually stopped) or he began to whisper. If you would like a copy of the MP3 containing this rant, e-mail me and I will send it to you right away; if you have better luck with the indiscernable parts, I would appreciate your help.