In absentia…

I’ve not been blogging, nor writing much for About.com at all lately. Bean is still going through some sort of bizarre insomnia, and I’ve had it on and off for awhile. My cats are acting totally freakish, and I’m working both jobs right now. Very tiring. Haven’t even been watching the news or keeping up with current trends, aside from “Best Week Ever” and “The Soup” (if such passes for one’s version of culture, of course). After 14 hours of “Lost” yesterday and an interminable marathon of “Law and Order” on Sunday, I can safely say television holds little allure right now.

We had a fun cookout on Sunday, just the four of us. Am actually thinking of selling my house to Matt and moving in with Shoova and Moro to Shoova’s old house. That will be interesting, if it happens. They had roommates lined-up to move with them, but plans fell through — and either they move to that house or they move out of state.

I’m not ready for that. Heh. Well, really – I’m not. Looking at them laying in the yard on Sunday, I tried imagining her living far away, and felt such pain inside. We’re finally at a good stage in our relationship: not living together, more on an equal playing field, understanding one another’s views better. Her moving will change all that. It really is the mom who can’t cut the cord, apparently.

Being a parent is hard…and you think it ends when they are 18 or 19 or, you know, engaged to be married. But it really doesn’t end there. Or, as far as I can tell, anywhere. And there’s nothing like being the parent of a teenager to bring you face to face with your failings as a human being, from the small (you don’t do this or that) to the large (remember when you said…you did….you thought). You are never quite good enough each day in myriad ways and there are never enough hours in a day to get everything done. Nor will you get everything done right.

The first time you’re ever viewed as having been a raging success is when your grandkids start getting older. Armed with the knowledge of just how tough and thankless parenting can be, suddenly your kids get it when they have kids of their own. Gone are the vows of their being a better, magical, perfect parent, replaced by a surprised voice telling you they can’t believe you managed all that work on so little time and money.

That’s what I recall, and probably the collective experience of many older parents. Everything looks easy from the outside. Only when you experience firsthand all the hours, minutes and days that make up being a parent do you truly come to understand how tough it can be.

My parents were 45 and 40 when they got me. Hard to imagine, me having the energy to have another child at this stage — but then, they hadn’t spent the last 20 years raising two kids. Instead, they vacationed and built a business. Which is better? To me, being a young parent was amazing, but scary. Older parents, more mellow, settled financially and every other way, might do a better job, but they’re tired more easily. And then there’s the aspect of getting old when your child is still young…
Either way, it’s a lot harder than people without kids realize, and you spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, worrying the this or that you didn’t do is going to result in long visits on someone’s couch. Your kids visits, or your own.

Still, if I had it to do all over, I’d do it all over again. Hopefully much better, and with more money.

As promised…

The Pepto Pink Palace, in living color:

See the whole optical illusion thing, as it happens? Must admit the effect was much better before. With a smaller picture, the zigging and zagging were all over. Just readily producing nausea with a side dish of dizziness.

The house inside seems to be doing this same thing, to both of us.

Insomnia, nausea, dizziness and headaches are hitting both Bean and I, long before the new fabu color scheme.

It has to be something in this house, but what? I toy daily with the idea of moving, but having come to love my house, warts, failures, imperfections and all, the idea of leaving it behind is something like the notion of leaving behind someone I love. Not likely.

Call me crazy, but it is precisely the flaws in everything I find most endearing.

Anyone or anything can be perfect, for a time, but that’s unreal and not truly desirable.

As human beings, we’ve lost a lot of our natural senses of what is beautiful and wonderful through our forced saturation in advertising and media, with their constant messages of constant perfection as beauty. We’ve come to expect everything, and worse, everyone, to function and look in top form, all the time. From that, we’ve extrapolated a somewhat subconscious belief that flaws are undesirable or worthy of scorn. Not true. In actuality, the very things which make us most real, most lovable and memorable as people, what makes us shine, are the ways in which we are imperfect and prone to fail. It is in these where all learning and growth are stored, as well as beauty.

When we speak of houses having character, we’re talking of their distinctions, what separates, and we are still told these are admirable, in structures. Why then are we told the opposite, when it comes to people? If I don’t have my Pantene-shiny, long brown hair, Abercrombie and Fitch sweater, perfectly spaced eyes covered in Long Lash Maybelline mascara, why am I not only being told every minute of every day via advertisement that I am somehow inferior, but why are you believing it? And what would happen, God forbid, if I were to believe it, too?

Why, I’d go get those things to make me blend. To turn me into another gallon of Reiter Milk, perfectly homogenized, sitting up on a shelf under a spotlight, with no surprises in store.

In the 50’s, when advertising first began, a study was done to show producers how best to market their products to consumers. What was eventually deduced was that people will buy anything as long as they are made to feel inferior from its lack. Convince someone to feel insecure, to compare themselves and what they have or have not with other people, and you will get them to buy your product.

Sadly, this eventually culminated into American Idol, reality television and Tru-Green.

Who needs any of those things? The terminally insecure. Those who believe that comparison and competition are the only ways of life, and a person is only successful when they are besting another person in any given arena. That actual life goals should include your grass looking exactly as green as every other lawn on the street and that absolutely everything is a competition. Even one that results in no actual person becoming a musical star and leaves, instead, a bunch of neverbeens trotting across a nationwide circuit together, singing song written by people who actually had talent and success.

Thanks, but. . .well. . .No.

My first ever revolt was in junior high, though many more came later. It revolved around the hideous one piece gym suit — striped blue and grey on the top down to the middle, solid blue “shorts” from the middle down. Everyone had to don it in order to participate in gym. First, I just subverted: a little bandanna action, a belt now and again, and, since I loved them so much at the time, a hoodie over it. I got detentions.

Eventually, I decided not to wear it at all. What the hell real purpose did it serve? Yes, there was an argument that it helped with range of motion – but surely shorts and a top would work as well. So I tried that, and got a detention. And another. Eventually, I flunked gym – more than once.

Tried rallying people to my side, showing them that the simple act of willingly putting on an outfit that was exactly the same as that of everyone else would make their souls complicit in accepting conformity. That their willingness in doing this was the first slide down a slippery slope to selling-out.

This, not surprisingly, didn’t work.

It did work with the lunches we were served as employees at Westwood Country Club, and that resulted in a sit-down between me and the managers to discuss what was appropriate food to serve teens and college students – where I was given the nickname Norma Rae.

But that’s a whole different story.

The point is, before the tools of our society’s decline were filtered through square electrified boxes in our living rooms, we all knew better. We knew that character, separateness, being beautifully ensconced in our flawed selves was the most beautiful way of living. That each of our imperfections were personally handed to us by our Creator, as a challenge to rise above, a special marking that made us recognizable to the souls with whom we are inexorably bound as we work through this physical existence, or simply as a way to make us each beautiful.

We’ve lost that, and it’s costing us dearly in so many ways: in chemicals we use with the idiotic belief that we can actually improve on Nature, in money we waste living life as if it were a competition and something we can actually win, in the things we do and say that are inauthentic in some ill-advised attempt to fit-in. Because we spend way too much time wondering what “perfection” there is outside ourselves that is preventing us from feeling whole, and not realizing it is precisely the imperfections which we work so hard to hide which make us beautiful, and whole.

Maybe the pink shutters can stay, after all, and I’ll stay here with them, just as I am.

A shuddering update

Driving into The Pepto Palace, I noted that one of our lovely shutters is falling forward, held to the house by only two loose screws (and there’s a lovely sarcastic metaphor if ever I saw one). Didn’t figure on keeping them up very long, just a week or so until I can buy more paint and work on them.

Question: What is the one thing that makes a pink-shuttered house look more cheesy?

Answer: When one shutter appears to be falling off.

As Bean would sing…”this is horrifying…”

My neighbor, one half of the dynamic DINK duo with their huge new home that dwarfs mine, blocks the sun and makes our tiny (now completely trashy) cottage look like their livery stable or brightly colored garage, was walking into her house today as I was leaving for my night job. (Not to be confused with my day job, which is going strong again.) I felt compelled to apologize to her for the shade of our shutters.

“It’s not actually that bad,” she said.

“Don’t worry – they won’t be up for long.” (Little did I know how true that was!)

So, it has come to this. Perhaps a disclaimer should be tacked to the beautiful tree out front, proclaiming public apology and repentance. Or just promising better things, soon.

The guy who cuts my lawn, Jeff, came by offering his services. He’s coming back on Friday. Believe I also apologized to him, for having to be the guy who pushes the mower at the posh pink version of housing Hell.

Maybe we should just take out an ad and be done with it.

But first, I will post a picture for posterity tomorrow.  Oh, the horror. . .

Gifted? Can we return that for cash?

I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs and Keirsey tests over and over again, through the years, and an interesting thing actually happened, from age 30 to 40: the results changed. I went from an ENFP to an INFP — the only difference being from Extravert to Introvert — but with a whole lot of subtle differences.

“On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, INFP is a rare personality type, found in only about one percent of the general population. Yet, of the possible 16 types, it is the one most frequently found for gifted people. This scarcity, coupled with their extreme intelligence, renders them seldom understood and, thus, rarely validated in relationships. The following material is based on qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with eight highly-gifted INFP adults.”

— INFP Personality Type in Gifted People

Well, I dunno. If I’m gifted, here’s hoping it comes with a receipt, because sometimes I’d like very much to send it all back. Or, well, at least parts of it. The ENFP I used to be, the Keirsey Champion Idealist type, is the bubbly, zany, anything can happen and I can make it happen girl who manifested thousands of life experiences just through willing them.

The INFP Healer Idealist is the melancholy, loyal dreamer monk woman, often rooting though her internals like so many antiques at a rummage sale. Other days, she sets out to move, shake and change the world, an archetypical explorer.

More than any other personality type, we’re focused on making the world a better place “by searching out the answers to what life really means and then culminating these findings into a clear purpose and active ways to better serve humanity. Based on these findings, they re-evaluate the path they are traveling, deciding whether to keep going straight or change course; always with the ultimate goal in mind—the good of all. Intuition, idealism, and perfectionism are the drivers that help them achieve goals to that end.”

Both temperments are rare in this world, with ENFP’s something like 2-4 percent of the population. We’re not valued in business, where the ESTJ’s get all the action: they’re like bulls, sucking up all the oxygen, or oxen pulling the company cart to success. Dreaming, possibilities, writing and intuition aren’t high corporate priorities. In fact, they’re not valued much in American society at all, where the other temperment types really dominate.

Fortunately, we are good at what we do, and no other personality types can do it but us. Look at the title of our types: Champions and Healers, both subsets of the Idealist category. In our own boisterous (and quiet) ways, we change the world and contribute to the lives of those around us through raising them up high enough to see their own potential. Through believing in things they cannot see and sharing those things with people we trust, who trust us, so that they may catch a glimpse of what is foreign to their world, including all the possibilities. Through acceptance, reliance on feeling and emotion, seeing potential in everything, having a willingness to take on others’ pain and through perspectives that are unique, unable to be replicated at will by others. Through making a difference in individual lives, rather than in a corporate setting or raising ourselves up in the material world, INFP’s feel they’ve made a difference in the world.

That seems like a gift, to me. But it comes with a whole lot of extraneous, difficult packaging. Sort of like a diamond wrapped in barbed wire and razor blades.

John Mellencamp should be shot

It was Bean’s idea, but really? I blame John Mellencamp.

Lately, we’ve been discussing maturity — or rather, my complete lack of it. Bean feels, and rightly so, that I need to be more objective, more mature, take the high ground, follow through on things. I need to grow up. Yes, she is 14 and I am 41. But you know what else? She’s absolutely right. I do over-analyze things and situations to death. I do have the tendency to bring up every bad thing that someone ever did when they do the next bad thing. She is far more grounded than I am.

Anyway, we decided to paint the house shutters today. Been ten years and they really were starting to look tie-dyed, the blue fading off and exposing white primer above their natural black shade of plastic.

So, this time, I let Bean pick. She liked pink. I liked light lilac or sage green.

We went with pink.

Eleven cans of spray paint, $50, and eight hours later, we’re expecting Ken to pull up out front in the Barbie Dream Car.

There’s no other way to put this: the color is HIDEOUS.

Words cannot even begin to do justice to the horror of bright pink. It melds with the darkness where the shutters fold in and out, creating some bizarre, shockingly harsh optical illusion of hot pinkness with dark lines that appear to move and sway — right before the migraine sets in. We tried looking at them from a little further away – walking out to the street. It didn’t work. So we got in the car and went around the block. Turning left towards our street on the adjacent street, we steeled ourselves.

“It’s not going to look that ba—,” I started, stopping as the first shutter came into view. We collapsed into laughter as I almost drove off the road.

“Please, please…let’s just put them in the shed and re-paint them next weekend,” Bean begged.
“No. We spent all day painting them. The spaces underneath them are dingy and dirty and need paint. I’d rather have a Barbie Dream House than Michael Myers’ Bungalow.”

“Please. I’m going to want to throw up every time I walk to the door.”

“No.”

I put the rest of them back up, hoping that once they were all in place, they would somehow blend. Instead, all of them together seem as though they’re conspiring to blind passers-by.

As I finished with the last (by myself, since Bean wanted no part of this horror show), she began singing a song. It went like this:

“Trailer trash next door

I wonder how much I can sell my house for?

This is horrifying

I wish that I was dying

Soon I will be flyyyying….

Awwwwaaaaaaay.”

“Maybe we could paint the words Pepto Bismal on the side of the house and get some sort of product placement money? People who drive by will automatically remember to take it,” I said.

Ignoring me, she kept singing.

We drove around the block a few more times, trying to approach the house from different angles, hoping for a miracle. But each time it just got a little more frightening. Brighter. More obscene. Eventually it looked like something that Elle Woods would consider too girly and over the top. I gave up.

“It’s not so bad, Bean. And it was the color you wanted…” I said, hopefully.

“Well, you shouldn’t try so much to make me happy. You should’ve gone with the color you wanted,” she responded.

“But then you would’ve always thought pink would have looked better and you’d have been upset,” I replied.

“I would have just whined and complained. You have to learn to get over that. And you didn’t have to put them back up!” she said.

Walking into the house with one final shudder at our pink shutters, I turned to her.

“You know,” I said slowly, “I only put them back up because I was being mature. We made a mistake and we have to live with it until we can find the time and money to fix it. You should be proud of me. “

“I really hate you, sometimes, Mom.”

Fireworks, or God flying past?

Can it be? Can I really be enjoying my job?? Blasphemy. Well, okay, yes. I am enjoying it more, ever since Monday’s presentation and the self-interrupting “Oooh, shiny” moment where, mid-sentence, I suddenly spouted something about the pretty starting firework going off for the Indians’ game. (Me? Need Ritalin? Why would you ask?)

Just that, well, I love finding things other people can’t. Yesterday Dawn couldn’t find a business in Ireland and, in about three seconds flat, I showed her Google Ireland and found her company. Then found the Ireland Business registry. Then, showing off, did the same thing for Indonesia. And it was all off-the-cuff, extemporaneous flashes of insight and intuition. My two biggest “in” words lately, along with the not so fave, insomnia. Which has somehow transfered itself to Bean. I am sleeping like a log (what a dumb metaphor, as logs don’t have REM functions) but she has not slept much in four days. We’ve tried figuring out what could be causing this, but nothing really seems clear. I was like that for a few days over the past several weeks and now she is, minus some of my more curious side effects.

Needless to say, functioning was, well, impaired. I had the craziest thoughts at the time. So it’s good to see my brain firing on all circuits again, and as speedily as ever. (Maybe too speedy, but that’s a subject for another time, lest I get distracted by something shiny beckoning from outside.) I didn’t even read any political blogs for awhile!

If only my entire work day consisted of searching and finding, playing Cyber Scooby, I’d be thrilled. That, and if it promised the absence of cell phones. I got another — against my better judgment but in order to keep up with emergencies and important callers. Have vowed not to turn into some car and store talking, texting freak. Am going to keep it safely tucked away most of the time.

Which means I may miss important calls, but at least I’ll be less annoying than two-thirds of the rest of our populace.

Not exactly a field of clover

Shoova loved it. I only kinda liked it. Christie didn’t like it and Bean thought it was alright: yup, we’re talking Cloverfield.

Shot nearly entirely with a digital hand-held (pass the dramamine, please), it’s allegedly like an updated, Americanized version of Godzilla. Only, if the actual monster was seldom seen and all the Japanese people around him were totally self-involved scenesters.

On the night of Rob’s going away party (ironically – he is going to Japan) a giant monster attacks Manhattan and the events are captured on videotape, first seen as a DoD evidentiary exhibit. We get snippets of video from Rob’s one torrid night with friend Beth, taken a month before the goodbye party and stupidly taped-over by Rob’s friend “Hud.” In between we get footage of mini-monsters flying from the feet of the giant monster (reminiscent of the ‘face sucking’ aliens from the far-superior Alien, which we watched last night), people being attacked and, the coolest thing about Cloverfield, Lady Liberty’s statuesque head careening through the sky and landing somewhere downtown.

So, the action is something like this: sex, party, fun, fun, stupidity, fun, fun, drinking, gossip, giant monster collisions, implausibility, gore, stupid rescue twist as plot device, fun, fun (well, for the audience anyway), rescue, salvation, oh crap,monster, not so fun, not over, monster again, drawn-out final scenes — and CUT. The moral (I think) was something about love conquering everything.

Whatever. That’s fine and all, but kind of self-defeating when you consider the actual ending – where the alien actually conquered everything.

Cloverfield earned a whopping two whisks out of five from my ratings system. Which is as follows:

Five whisks means it’s a great movie that I couldn’t bear to walk away from, even if whatever’s cooking on the stove should burn — or, better yet, I’m not even cooking/talking on the phone/pulling weeds/carrying on a conversation/’net surfing/cutting hairballs off my cat —because I’m actually giving a movie my full attention.

Four whisks means it’s a decent movie, decent enough for me to watch and only engage in one of the other aforementioned activities.

Three means it’s fair, and it’s a fair bet I’m probably spending half the time in the kitchen creating something good to eat while talking on the phone.

Two is…well, two whisks is Cloverfield. Think I made chili, crescent rolls and deviled eggs while watching this movie — and then we ate them in the last 30 minutes.

One whisk is usually a movie someone else loves that is totally not my thing, like anything starring Will Ferrell.

Cloverfield, however, did have a perfect ending. Too bad it came about 15 minutes before the movie was over.

Where I’ve been…

Here.

Understanding what matters, what doesn’t and how we know the difference.

Am still writing. When the time is right, I’ll share what it is I’m writing about. For now, a brief interlude while I follow my own path for a time and take care of the special things and people in my life.

Moments that defy understanding. . .

If Moses really did talk to a burning bush, I wonder how he felt trying to go to work the next day and tell his peers about it. Standing around in the morning, sipping coffee, how does one work into that conversation?

“So, what did you do last night?”

“Oh, me? Not much. I was just out prodding the cattle and, well, then this bush spoke to me.“

Whether we realize it or not, all of us have some moments where the bramble in the corner starts yapping. Big, small, crucial, circumstantial, doesn’t matter: once in awhile, you just know something extraordinary has happened. And sometimes, it’s best to slough it off, blame coincidence, think it a trick of the light, or the Bud Light.

Up until recently, my “burning bush” story has always been about finding the tiny diamond from a family heirloom ring just sitting on one of my keyboard keys the next morning after it went missing. Was the same color as the carpet I was vacuuming the day before, when it fell out of the ring, during a particularly spazzy Labor Day party. I was pretty sure it was lost forever, and pretty bummed over it.

So the next day, finding it face-up on a keyboard letter, I figured one of the girls had found it and put it there some time in the wee hours of the night. Not so. How that stone made its way to the keyboard remains one of my favorite Burning Bush memories.

Had another one of these, nearly a week ago Friday. Lest they lock me away, I’ll skip the details, other than to say it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life – in the middle of a really lousy one. It had grace, and happiness, and a spiritual resonance that has yet to leave. Nothing was burning, though. While it eventually brought me total peace — and it could be attributed to lack of sleep — I don’t think it came from inside myself, or from anyone I currently know. I do believe that it was a conversation I can’t have with nearly anyone, at work or anywhere else. Unfortunately, parts of it involved bad events for other people, but for me it was a message of hope as long as I am willing to do the necessary work and fulfill my promise.

Since 2006, my life became pretty stressful. I’ve done things that have surprised me, both good and bad. Like everyone, I’m perfectly imperfect – and learning every day a little more how true this is. But I’ve also learned that I can rise to the occasion, when needed, and take care of the people I love when they need me. And that this is not an imposition, or some kind of “co-dependent” psychobabble; it is the action of real love, giving your hands and heart to help the people who have always been there for you. It’s messy, and difficult, painful sometimes physically and in other ways, but giving of yourself and your time are the best gifts anyone has to give.

Nearly two years later, I’m seeing not only how much that period of life took out of me, but how much it gave back. I’m no longer afraid of the day that will come – that must come – when my parents are gone from this earth. Sad, yes, but finally accepting that this is what it is. I’m also not worried about what will happen when the nest is empty, so to speak. Because it never really will be empty. The decades of laughter and tears, fights and frustrations, painful honesty and mutual acceptance between myself and the girls will keep us together no matter what changes in our living arrangements.

We are connected. We are stronger together than any of us is apart, and we make sure that we are always together, in some form.

And life will take me wherever God intends, with a little help and faith from me, and maybe even a few more burning bush moments.

The cloak of theocracy, stripped

Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi goes undercover at a retreat for the Flock of Mad Pastor John Hagee and writes one of the best pieces I’ve ever seen on The March of the Theocrats, from his new book: The Great Derangement.

Aside from needing to disclose a “childhood wound” and only coming up with a professional clown father who beat him with a pair of oversized clown shoes — Matt exposes not only the fake world of perfectly-coiffed Pastors filling the readily accepting heads of the faithful, but his own quasi-conversion to Stepford Religion that happened, by accident.

Before anyone gets bent over that last paragraph, let me just say I am religious. Spiritual might be the better word. Whatever. I believe in God, have always believed in God since being a little kid and try very hard to live up to a higher sense of morality and conscience. (The operative word being try, of course. ) Would say I’ve been pretty successful at it, too, though prone to doubts about others’ motives as well as my own, and a tendency to over-think. Oh, and the fleeting moments of self-righteous bitchery where my mouth or fingers simply overtake my head and heart — instant Hell, just add anger. I’ve always had a thing for the underdog. Think the exact phrase once used on me was “you have a drive to punish the unjust and guilty.” In the case of modern theocracy, I’d say the drive is more to punish the cruel and false. But, you get the gist.

But there is a huge difference between being innately spiritual or religious, sometimes failing, and wearing your faith as a cloak to cover a multitude of sins and evil. Underneath the venom-spewing Hagee’s Sunday garb beats a heart more than willing to stretch the truth, to demonize entire groups of people (conflating Ezekiel with a promise that Jesus is going to return to give -specifically – the ACLU a smackdown, for instance). There also lies a whole lot of avarice in his leadership of the Texas mega-church he calls home.

He and all those tv pastors with their costly suits, their helmet hairdos, their easy twisting of Biblical passages with whatever current cultural trend they despise. The hatred they espouse with easy, winning smiles, bellowing in booming baritone, their ire drenched in a creamy, sunny message that’s two-parts secular feel-goodism and one part Armageddon is a heady brew. And the “faithful” eat it all up, with a spoon — going out to preach the teachings of Jesus-as-Dominatrix: that of which we do not approve we must KILL.

The theocrats are ruining this country and they’re killing the image of Jesus. So, they get no quarter, really. Their God is allegedly my God, too — only theirs is on steroids and in a really lousy, vengeful mood.

What’s fascinating to me about this excerpt from Matt’s book, “The Great Derangement,” is the following passage:

“Here I have a confession to make. It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.”

Religion as cloak. Religion as subversive means to an ill end. Religion all dressed-up in fake finery with hatred at its core is the work of the Devil. And yet, as Matt discovered, it’s not without appeal. Which makes me all the more certain it is from the Devil. The appeal, I suspect, lies in our very human, very wonderful need to belong, to be accepted within a group larger than our individual selves, and to believe in something with more power than our frail human bodies ever can muster.

It’s wonderful because it’s an extension of connectedness, a natural desire to care for, be with, and understand our shared condition. But when it’s perverted and used against us, when that innate need is used to create an army of darkness, it becomes something evil.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a sacred Hindu text from 7th or 8th century BC, describes demons as being “very cruel, who always insult, injure and harm other people” and are “hard-hearted.” They are those who “delight in the grief of others,” often causing it themselves. “Any tendency in us to see others punished, put behind bars, bung up with chains or sent to the gaol; any tendency in us to see the subjugation of others, our vindictive attitude, the attitude of reaping vengeance, whatever be the reason behind it, whatever be the justification behind it, is the demon – or Asura – working within us.”

“If you can be happy when others are made unhappy,” it explains, “you are a demon.“

Time and time again in this country it is these same people who support the continued war in Iraq and more death. It is certain sects of “religious” that espouse killing gay people, using guns whenever desired for whatever purpose. These faithful people are the largest and loudest proponents of hatred, division, us versus them and are openly scornful of pacifism, delighting in violence against others with whom they disagree. And they are not striped by other forms of Christianity – just a select few groups.

I think that explains quite well where Hagee and his faithful fall. Don’t you?

If the above excerpt was the best in terms of insight, this part was the hands-down winner in humor. Describing the final “big show” of the weekend retreat, Matt is inspired:

“The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment, crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness, everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and John Updike novels.”

Well, c’mon. Everyone loves Updike.