Sunday, December 2, 2012

Ch 7 part 2 – Bastille Day from Enron to Acorn and the House of Sacred Sod

Back to Chapter 7 part 1

Chapter Seven – Bastille Day from Enron to Acorn and the House of Sacred Sod part 2

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Within the month Enron broke.  Arthur Andersen, Enron, and the war on terror were Lou Dobbs masturbation material.  Suddenly the place where Ashley and I worked was like a poked dirt mount of pavement ants scurrying for something to cling on or hunker down with.  The queen was leaking blood.  The drones could smell it everywhere, everyday.  Ashley and I were fresh to the scene, newbie’s to gainful employment and corporate culture meltdown’s, but we were learning fast.

Enron was a top-ten stock-exchange client.  Enron was the darling performing on the profit stage out of Andersen’s Houston office.  Insiders talked about Enron as a golden child prodigy client shifting the paradigm of multiple industries.  Enron was growing into new commercial arenas of trading electricity like an investment security, deregulating natural gas markets for higher prices and more corporate profit with less regulation. 

The first few months the size of the hole in this Titanic was minimized like a Comical Ali Iraqi information minister on government broadcast.  The cancer was confined to the Houston Office.  This was just one client for a firm that had been around since 1913.  We were a nine billion dollar a year global company.

By spring I think Andersen was trying to bale water until the April 15th individual tax filing dead line.  Obstruction of justice loogie-hocks were made by every ivory-tower media-member.  Everybody was nervous.  We went to work with a constant paranoia that the plug could be pulled at any moment.  Mortgage payments would be late.  School tuition would go unfunded.  College-loans shit-fisted.  Best laid plans would crumble down one way elevator shafts of closed offices from Brisbane to Denver.

On a Thursday afternoon meeting, the head partner Tom Casey called us together for a presentation.  Tom explained three percent equity threshold requirements to incorporate debt into the balance sheets of Enron investing in SPE’s, special purpose entities.  SPE’s were like magical dark-orphanages of accounting that could keep the ugly club-footed bastard debt and deformed liability children nobody wanted to look at as long as they did not have too much of the parental Enron-DNA.  Enron and Andersen befuddled themselves and the mob families of Wall Street with research and legalistic accounting minutia.  What Andersen and Enron did not mention was how much of that debt was guaranteed on Enron’s stock price.  When the stock price fell, the card towers tumbled.  Siamese twin accounting bodies were severed through the gullet.  Death ensued.

Tom explained what the rules technically said, “how if this number is not bigger than this number than the rules say it is all ok.”  If there was no rule that said Enron could not lock up the ugly Sloth-from-the-Goonies money it owed for its binge drinking two a.m. Jager shots it took on pipe-dream projects to add assets to meet growth projections, then it had to be ok?  Who gives a fuck if Enron aided black outs in California and directed Schwarzenegger to the governator’s office?  If it’s legal then it must be ok?  What happens when the rules are wrong?  What happens to the child who is never given boundaries when he hits fifteen Mr. Friedman?

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If the hundreds of special purpose entities were Enron’s unwanted stepchildren, then Enron was Milton Friedman, Kenneth Lay and Ayn Rand’s Texas ménage a trois drunken bender love-child and every regulation naysayer’s punch in the nuts.  Jedi, Chewco and Whitewing came out of George Lucas fantasies into the nightmares of retirement plans. 

Enron existed based on a lowest denominator human motivation, greed blanketed inside authority.  Like a Milgram experiment, if someone above us tells us the action is permissible, then we acquiesce our own individual morality for an external culpability assigned to the group-level authority figure granting us this exemption.  

The culture at Enron, like almost every public company fraud specimen, was a virus based on stock-based compensation where bonuses and carrots were put out there to make the short-term goal of an increase of the stock price occur like a rat clicking for a pellet for Wall Street over the long -term goal of corporate survival.  All the rodents had the disease.  It was spreading, but America was in more denial than Regan was about gay cancer in the 1980’s.  What was it really?  Who was causing it?  Who suffers?

Eventually the company’s hot-potato holding investors found out that the pellet was actually filled with poison.  Employees saw their retirement plans swell like humpback bladders gorging on Arctic krill biomass buffets.  The financial sped up treadmill was like a crack junkie always needing a bigger hit to make up for the weakened high from the holes he put in his system.  More and more was required to make up for the last quarter, the last fix. 

Wall Street is a merciless dealer.  As long as the love-handles were growing who cares about the eventual heart attack?  Mark to market, merchant model who gives a fuck, it is all bullshit.  What investment banker or day trader actually reads or understands a 10-K before buy or sell declarations?  What senator actually reads the bill?  Who can contemplate beyond an infomercial?

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There was a meeting at a downtown hotel ballroom for all the Andersen people in the New Orleans area.  The retired and the current partners were at war with divergent objectives about if Andersen was going to survive and how.  How would these people be dispersed?  Who would serve clients?  Who would pay the legal bills? 

In the end it was about appearances, not justice or rules, or fixing, or right and wrong or even identifying fault.  Public perception is king.  The public could put all of Andersen’s face on the dartboard.  That was just easier than parceled sentences nobody wanted to take the time to read.  Andersen wasn’t Jesus.  Andersen wasn’t Barabbas either, but when you think about it what the fuck did Barabbas even do?  The papers of the day had a story, but how do we really know?  Somebody’s got to taste blood.

I was a gopher running Krispy Kreme donuts every other week to one of my oil and gas clients.  I was learning the joys of corporate America.  My knowledge of gas balancing increased.  My confidence in the ice I was standing on decreased.  Kenneth Lay, Jeffery Skilling, and Andrew Fastow were making Andersen’s total take of fifty-plus million a year in Enron fees feel like Arthur Andersen took one too many cookies from the dessert bar on the cruise ship.  The iceberg was already hit. 

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In the spring, one day after busy season, I was called in at four p.m. on a Monday afternoon into Tom Casey’s office.  Like a third grader to the principal I knew what was wrong.  My senior on the job gave me this look of, “Thank God it is not me” as he communicated the summons.  I left the client I had brought glazed donut crack-rings to earlier and collected my audit trunk.  Ashley already knew.  Ashley had been warned and assured of her life preserver income stream for our little family for the time being. 

I walked in.  Tom Casey looked at me with this morose-melancholy resigned understanding of the terms of exchange.  His words included, “I am sure you know what this is about.  It has nothing to do with your performance,” but the E-word was never uttered.  The termination was brisk and professionally executed.

I had not the tenure to earn a suitable professional title, merely staff.  I was easily shed, for if I had the time earn such accolades or designations, this experience would have been infinitely more torturous.  The ignominy of self-identification as an ex-Andersen man would have been a public scourge.  My selfhood would have been circuited away like a machine causing me to pivot chaotically in my fresh freedom incapable of handling the aftermath on my own.

I do not remember if I even made my way to Ashley.  I just collected my things in silence and headed home.  I kept my green squig-ruler and my collection of Andersen volunteering t-shirts from when we did things like Habitat for Humanity.  Andersen cares.

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In the upcoming weeks other personnel were jettisoned as flotsam.  Andersen was indicted and pariah number one.  Felons can not submit audit reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  Obstruction of justice meant out of business.  Eventually the ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court, but those are hollow words to a dead man.  There was that whole WorldCom thing too.  My Frisbee golf friends in Jackson were especially in love with Bernie Ebbers.  What’s the good in shooting a corpse?

Sarbanes-Oxley was born like a panacea of corporate fraud.  The act was just a new product for the surviving big four accounting firms to sell.  (The cake is a lie.)  Andersen survivors scattered.  Offices were bought up in bidding wars to the other four.  (Hal the cake does not exist.)  Ernst and Young got the New Orleans office and became Ashley’s new crowded life raft for the ants still left at the picnic. 

The stress migrated.  Cut-throat bill the desired multiple of what you get paid blood-thirst was still in play.  There was the legacy Ernst and Young (E.Y.) tribe and the float over on the raft starving Arthur Andersen’s (A.A) tribe.  The game of survivor started immediately.  Andersen’s office was bigger.  Almost all the clients traveled over in the pockets of the A.A. partners as bartering chips to feed the troops rations.  The Andersen partners who had equity lost their status.  Non-equity partners became managers. 

The stark-faced New Orleanian contingent of this global accounting Diaspora kept swivel necks with three-sixty vision.  E.Y. infiltrators came in with that prom-queen sly compliment you on your skill-set entrapment to learn everything they could about Andersen clients.  There had been a not so secret E.Y. meeting prior to the comingling where they were handed their hidden immunity idols.  E.Y. tribe members were assured of certain affirmative-action-style selection mechanisms for seniority. 

The usual dozen E.Y. bodies competing for eight spots on each promotion level were now competing for fifteen available.  All the E.Y. would be in the fifteen working on ex-Andersen jobs after a year. 

Ashley saw the spray paint on the cubicles pretty quickly.  Ashley was under stress trying to impress these new father-figures and counsel in secret with the old ones.  Many of the A.A. people were now taking orders from E.Y. people with less total work experience on jobs A.A. brought in.  It was like a wicked step-mother getting on your ass to clean the bedroom your mother use to sleep in.  She has the power.  What the fuck were you going to do?

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I was falling into a depression.  Accountants do not hire right after tax season.  Men without jobs are penis-less.  The industry is designed to work you to death for the first half of the year and hire before the build up for the next go round.  I applied at almost every firm in the city.  For a while the Andersen to E.Y. thing was not settled, so the market was paralyzed.  I felt so unmanly.  I felt like my dick and my balls were ripped off and put in a box.  I had to go around asking every bald headed CPA in town if I could have my manhood back.  My wife was working.  Ashley had her own stress. 

I started to fixate on, “why me.”  Why did I get chosen to get laid off?  A group of the single women auditors I came in with survived.  Was it my manager jumping ship a few weeks before I got let go?  I heard there was a meeting with a straw poll just before the first firing-squad.  I took it personally when logic told me otherwise.  I was devastated.  I prayed.  Life slammed my face right back on the concrete. 

We were just married and already being tested.  Ashley and I had each other, food, shelter, plenty of time to start over and pay down college debts and get moving.  Credit card crack dealers were always out there to give us the first-hit free if we had to join minimum payment club America.

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After three months I had an interview with a local firm, Stam and Jenkins.  They made me an offer on this sheet of paper from a manual typewriter, for a little over half of what my salary was at Andersen.  No paid overtime, just an all-you-can-work tripe buffet at the bottom of the barrel of public accounting: governmental and nonprofit auditing.  A bald fellow, befitting Ebenezer, pushed the paper across his desk.  I signed my manhood in a fresh noose.

I had no experience in governmental.  Tulane does not teach it.  As if you are going to pay forty grand a year at the time to go to school to go do the accounting for a water district.  That doesn’t even count room and board.  There was no negotiation or congratulations. 

All this electronic excel knowledge, Doc-man paper-less auditing, oil and gas, publically traded company expertise might as well have been Marty McFly trying to barter for gasoline in Back to the Future Three.  Stam and Jenkins was not even using Microsoft Excel.  They had some DOS-based trial-balance program.  It was like being told to start whittling wood with a bottle of lighter fluid and a match sitting on the side-table with an off-limits sign.

My frustration of “I should not even be here today” clerking in some ass-backwards stone-age gray-walled cave of an office became rampant.  I was like Kevin Smith’s Dante yelling at my self inside my own cubicle-brain inferno.  I was arrogant.  I felt I knew more than my superiors about a lot of subject matters that would have more pertinence, if we were permitted to use electronic paradigms in place of the required paper and pencils. 

Stam and Jenkins was a menagerie of frustrated and bitter damned souls.  They paid shit, taught you very little and low self-esteem was a top-three employment quality to curb rebellion.  (Where else ya gonna go?  Want to be a contract temp?  Put that bit back if you want this health insurance son.)  One manager, across the hall, would yell sometimes at how asinine some of the partners acted.  They moved him out of client-earshot by us grunts in a lower pit. 

There was no email allowed.  The partner’s thought we could all use a firm email address.  The receptionist could print out any emails we needed from clients.  The inmates in this asylum were not to be trusted with such renegade business practices as email.  Do not even ask about internet access.  The typing pool matron held more power than most of the CPA’s. 
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I had a rolling trunk for my work junk and eventually an audit of the city of Nottoway.  We had to carpool out New Orleans and brown bag our lunch.  The accountant at the city of Nottoway was a pork-bellied redneck named Ricky Brico.  Ricky Brico was skilled with a father born in Nottoway who had the prime genetic qualifications for being on the city council. 

I taught myself Single Audits and secretly designed a system in my bootleg excel on the fourteen compliance components for the city’s big federal grant.  I figured out the most complicated part of the audit.  Intellectual challenges were hard to find.  Soft-skill challenges were like rats on a slave ship.

I worked on some city governments, retirement systems and utility districts.  I learned about the vast difference between a defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plan.  Defined benefit is where the plan promises the employee some percentage of their salary for life.  Defined contribution is like a 401k where the employer contributes some percentage and a plan account earns what it earns and that is what the employee gets. 

Basically every private sector defined benefit plan was dying, because of their infeasibility and converted to defined contribution for survival.  Government employees remained unfazed sticking in the benefit quicksand, because the government can not go bankrupt.  After September 11, 2001, the stock markets took such a hit that all the taxpayer funded reimbursement requirements skyrocketed to make up for the losses.

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Stam and Jenkins biggest client was one that I tried to avoid over ethical concerns and the office gossip, but eventually its tentacles came winding.  A.C.O.R.N., something about organizations for reform now, was this nonprofit organization that required over forty audits.  The national financial headquarters was in an old funeral home on Elysian Fields avenue outside the French Quarter.  There was a little house next to Acorn where Stam and Jenkins personnel were constantly stationed doing audits for all these components in a dimly-lit kitchen on card tables. 

Acorn had subterranean mazes of entities.  There was the main Acorn, Project Vote for “nonpartisan voter registration,” a Housing assistance consulting component, (they did not actually provide housing they just talked to people about it,) and most importantly this Acorn Justice component that basically went around suing people and organizations that were deemed, well for a made-up word for a made-up business model, sue-able.  Acorn had one of these virus-versions of it self in just about every major city in every state in America.  Acorn was a mess run by a bunch of lunatics, but one thing they were very good at was filling out federal grant applications. 

Acorn was crazy.  The little house with the card tables had a bedroom in the back.  The homosexual love-boys of some guy that appeared to be in charge would often wake up to make coffee while we audited in the barely-lit shotgun home kitchen.  Roaches scattered and assembled.  The irate “controller” Augustine and Jorge the Hank-Azaria-Birdcage-diction Cuban assistant would try to explain questions away.  Piles of paper were scattered and lost.  There were all these rearranged entities funding an incestuous mix of housing, voting, finance education, and lawsuits.

Acorn would see a grant and create a company with a mission exactly stated to meet the purposes of that grant.  What they did was secondary to the fact that there was a paper that said Acorn did it.  Acorn obtained the grant and spent it in many cases shifting funds to one of its other entities in this massive web of due to and due from’s, which could not possibly be reconciled by these paper-based compatriots of mine or myself. 

The taxpayer funds would almost be spent entirely on salaries for consulting services.  The invoices were just Acorn billing itself.  Who knows where the tax dollars actually went?  The controller just printed them out next door as needed for us to match the amount on one to another in some pantomime of auditing.  Bank statements said somebody got paid.

Acorn on the inside was disorganized with ledgers that did not balance.  The controller Augustine’s attitude was a glaring fraud indicator.  Augustine was an angry Narnian white-queen bitch of a woman who constantly argued with us why we needed support for audit areas.  I kept this invoice from one internal organization to another in my cubicle to remind me of the irony.  Project Vote paying Arkansas A.C.O.R.N., purpose “for non-partisan voter education services $13,000.”  Next to it I had a newspaper cut out of Acorn’s endorsements for the Louisiana’s state elections supporting Claude Buddy Leach for Governor and Charles Foti for Attorney General.

From Enron to Acorn, my career made me quickly realize this CPA-stuff was all just a different color of bullshit held in either the right or left hand, just like everything else.  It is all bullshit we give labels to make us feel better that we are doing good and making do, but we are telling people what they want to hear to keep everything copasetic so no one revolts or complains too hard.  We are as hypocritical as congress berating steroid baseball players: cheating, gerrymandered rules, and elitist’s prerequisites to “success” or “fairness.”

What are we going to do, storm Wall Street and state houses with pitchforks, torches, and a manifesto of demands?  Who is the redder devil?  Ideas, pffff, fuck ideas.

As an auditor I sign some paper that is like the oil that greases the motor of the free market economy, but at the end of the day no one wants to read the paper.  They just want someone to sue if something goes wrong.  The people we are supposed to be independent from to call fouls on are the people who pay us.  Auditors are like financial statement insurance.  We are just another Baskin-Robbins flavor of bullshit.

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For Halloween in 2002, while a D.C. madman sniper was popping victims out the trunk of a Chevy Caprice, Ashley dressed up as a CNN reporter.  I dressed up in a shirt I got from the final days of Arthur Andersen.  My shirt was Halloween-hued black with block orange letters that read, “I am Arthur Andersen” on the front and back.  The offices dispersed them to all the personnel and held rallies for the media near the end to try to put another face on the firm.  Ashley had a power suit with a placard that stated in red letters, “CNN Correspondent,” then in blue letters, “I fucked Arthur Andersen.”  We went down the quarter and got drunk.  New Orleans does not need an excuse to dress-up and play adult pretend.

My brother Tim was out in the Quarter passing out flyers for his new campaign, “The Soldiers of Sainthood.”  Tim was not evangelizing or picketing for Jesus.  He was trying to keep the New Orleans Saints in New Orleans.  The football team was renegotiating its lease with the state and in a very public debate for subsidized tax payments to keep the team in Louisiana. 

Louisiana is infamous for being fiftieth of forty-ninth depending on Mississippi’s rank on every good list and one or two on every bad one.  One would think with the delta, the gulf, all the natural resources, and a hundred-year head start on most of America that New Orleans would be booming, but complacency, cronyism, and racist engineering designed to keep things the same no matter what, shipped most of Louisiana’s sons and daughters with options out of state. 

Tim built this website, keepthesaints.com.  I helped him with a database with every state legislator’s email address to get people to contact their reps and senators to help keep the Saints in one centralized website  We loved the black and gold on an emotional level.  No matter how bad on the field, they were our mutts, our reprieve from our own insecure, “We can say it, but you can’t” problems of our city.  Tim got on the radio with the local WWL kingpin Buddy Deliberto who had an only in New Orleans radio Yat-diction. 

Tim got on the local news.  He got daily calls from the state senate floor.  Tim was doing something that he was passionate about, whether it was just about a sports team or not, I respected that.  Besides the Saints put way more into the state coffers than any subsidy was going to take out.  The only reason New Orleans ever got a team in the first place was due to political blackmail to circumvent anti-trust concerns for the league back in the sixties.  Ashley and I helped Tim pass out flyers.  It must have at least not hurt, because the state renewed the lease.  I learned a bit about the power of the web, of connecting humanity into action.  If we want change an idea can spread like a virus and actually accomplish the fruition of an idea.  I felt an inkling of a rebel.

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Ashley and I were recuperating.  We were trying to find something solid to rely on, save money for our own house and move on from the corporate drama.  We never wanted a big pile of money to sleep on, just a family.  Maybe I would never be a titled equity partner and that was a good thing.  Stam and Jenkins was pride-sucking daily.  The fraud that I could taste, but not prove made me nauseous like using an oxidized forty year old green patina penny as a lozenge.  At least I had a testicle to contribute.

In 2003, I escaped for another local firm, Boudreaux and Borges, which was a palatable intermediate.  The firm was local, but progressive.  I started to do tax work with my audit work.  The firm was adopting paperless auditing.  I got to share all this knowledge that was swept onto the island of misfit skill-sets when I was with Stam and Jenkins. 

There was no more Acorn, a good bit more for profit work, but still some nonprofit stuff.  Ashley was doing well at Ernst and Young, but the timeline of the legacy E.Y. tribe had enough experience to strip most of the A.A.’s of their clients. 

We were ready to expand our family.  We were armed with a marital love, having survived Andersen.  We knew each other.  For there is only one thing more dangerous than parenting a child with a stranger, and that is parenting a child with a partner slathered in the monotony of an imperfect totality of knowledge; as if the other has become incapable of growth or redefinition in the annals of time shackled by the constraints of marriage.  Time was fluid.   Ashley and I were our own forest, still enigmatic with burgeoning roots.

Ashley left E.Y. to work as a controller for a local law firm.  Ashley was twenty-seven and heading the ship of older lawmen, managing their finances, getting their closet-messes organized.  Ashley was a ball-wrangler over a basketball team of medical malpractice attorneys.  Ashley was still ironing her father’s clothes, just this time by accounting for cash advances for men and women with disfigurements and inhalation contaminations while making sure payroll got out on time. 

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We bought our first home, a fixer-upper in a New Orleans suburb a bit out of the crime rings.  The house was blessed with an abundance of seventies wood-paneling, an extended bar room with a pub mirror that the previous owner died smoking in a chair.  The guy was found by the neighbors.  I always had a reluctant gratitude that his cigarette had not burned down the domicile with his body’s expiration. 

The man was a Star Trek fan with posters of Kirk and Piccard with a trapezoid entry way into the master bedroom.  There was a long pole with a knife on the end left in the house that we figured out was for stabbing holes in the onyx-painted ceiling that with the aid of a black light made the under roof look like a canopy of stars. 

The backyard was entirely concrete with a charcoal liquid swimming pool and uneven levels.  The front of the house was full of mauve carpeting.  The rest of the house had this four-H-clover looking tile that was apparently installed by a Mexican tile maker that was the owner before the Trekkie-smoker.  The neighbor told us the Mexican’s wife died in the pool after the black water made the home uninhabitable. 

The two-dead body house was big, a good square-foot value for two accountants.  Ashley and I became Home Depot aficionados.  Ashley was always her father’s daughter, more tom-boy country-girl than prom queen.  Ashley growing up had a nail to hand her father for his hammer.  Our new home was no different.  Hilton helped us out tremendously, driving in and pouring hours of time to aid our reclamation.  My dad helped where he could, but without Hilton, the project was a no-go.

We spent nights stripping wood paneling, laying lock and grove wood flooring, painting, and hanging light fixtures.  Rooms were embalmed, ceilings were refloated and the bones of the house shined with a youthful glow. 

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In October of 2003, Ashley and I were finally ready to shed the condoms and start trying for our first child.  Ashley researched and prepared for pregnancy like it was a section of the CPA exam.  Ashley was on prenatal vitamins for the previous three months.  Ashley extracted caffeine from her diet and every suboptimal activity for the job description.  If Ashley was going to be in conception-mode, she was going to be in uniform ready for work from day one.  We were trying unfettered.

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Right before Halloween I went with my father Timothy on a Catholic silent retreat to this place in the bayou bowels of Louisiana called Manresa run by Jesuit followers of St. Ignatius.  We could talk on the first Thursday night until dinner was over, then until Sunday after mass there was no speaking allowed, not even solitary in the dormitory.   I always thought talking to yourself aloud alone was ok, as long you didn’t expect anyone to answer, but I kept my mouth shut on this weekend.

I kept a notebook and wrote copiously.  I sorted Enron and Andersen, my marriage and my hopes of becoming a father.  I wanted honesty, vulnerability to God.  I wanted to prosper an awareness of how my choices affected my family, to recognize the needs of my wife to fulfill my roles in earnest as partner, confidant, care giver, to know my limitations and to recognize what I can not do as an opportunity for openness rather than fault.  I wanted to meditate on what it meant to be a father. 

I flipped a two-sided coin, the insignificance of self with God as the counterpart.  I wanted to embrace humility.  I questioned why the corporate world was so stressful with the overtime, politics and fraud.

Questions were in the silence.  New technologies could make me an answer giver.  I wanted to be a provider-man for my wife. 

I reflected on my problems with authority.  What if I thought their dinosaur-way was wrong?  I was away from Stam and Jenkins, but this punk-resentment still sloshed.  I wanted to be copacetic.  I still had a natural inclination to avoid humanity.

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I knew I needed a job as part of society.  If God had given me the brain of an athlete, a writer, a painter, an educator, an electrician, a contractor, a police officer, a politician, a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, a sales person, a clerk, a janitor, a talk show host, a priest, a cook, a real estate agent, a stock broker, a banker, a controller, a maid, a childcare worker, a gardener, a fireman, an engineer, a criminal, a musician, a plumber, an actor, a department manager, fill in the blank, maybe I would be different better or worse. 

I needed to be me.  I needed to be at peace.  Each profession has its benefit, its flaws, but does it allow me a way to be happy with who I am, to see my time there as a fair trade for my impact away from my family?

I felt since Andersen died I got a raw deal.  I was one of the crappiest, easiest shits to shed.  Logic and Tom Casey told me, it was not performance-based.  I had cynicism tattoos.  Disappointment howled at disillusionment.  I am human.  I am flawed.  Jobs are not definitions.

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I sorted thoughts.  I did not have universal answers or claim to be right.  I saw a simple rawness of God in all that we do.  There is no movement of segmentation where God is less or more with me.  God is constant.  It is I who wax and wane in my consciousness and recognition of his presence. 

There is no extreme of constant praise and outward preoccupation, but balance in daily pursuits.  I am a conduit to use even my simplest gifts to give to others; intelligence, patience, work ethic, love, humor, creativity, pain, trials, teaching, writing, understanding, ignorance, my zeal to discuss taboos, fear, courage and humanity. 

I made a bullet-point list of my purpose, my Frankl-cliff-notes, of reasons to live: wife, family, humans, playing, growing, questioning.  It is not extreme, grand or perfect.

I made reassurances to myself in barter with God to exchange silent conversation inside my dorm-room notebook for my own solace.

I see variables like puzzle pieces.  If I do not know the fit, I can ask.  The concept will clarify as fear evaporates.  If tasks do not get done on time the world will not end.  If I loose my job I will be ok.

Control and justice are human illusions.  Justice is eternally out of reach like a rainbow.  Perpetuating anger, fear, or resentment births depression from phantom justifications.  Mental constructions are fully retractable. 

I try to know that for all that has, is, or will ever be in all existence regardless of person, city, state, country planet, solar system, universe or what ever spacious physical area contemplated by man, it is all the creation of God.  That creation in all the simultaneous or prolonged effort, which would appear to be required in human terms, is done without the blink of an eye in energy or time by God.  God is independent of those dimensions and thus all is possible and is done.  Each of us exists all at once and continues through God. 

All this religion may be pointless semantics, but the point of God is our connection.  In God’s gifts of life there are phases of joy, of peace, of stasis of wanting for better, of fault, but the pieces are tools to be used with choices.  God has given us the freewill to know we have freedom to do that which is joyous, that which is painful, to have a fully-faceted experience as God on earth as man in the Christian paradigm of Jesus did or as other religious icons; with choices, to come to conclusions, to come to how we live with our available choices on our terms with God.

For what is life if God were to hand us Eden?  To hand us perfection, to provide infinite resources of nutrition, of sustenance, of love, of partnership, of joy without choice to know so innocently that we never left, this world is our Eden.  All the beauty and infinite possibilities are here.  Our choices cloud the pathways. 

People decide to sin against God by sinning against God’s people, by segregating our connection from our self in the connection to this one everything.  We unplug as a conscious act.  Murder, lies, adultery, racism, separatism, theft, rape, battery, myopic religious prejudices, indifference, selfishness, anger, hatred, stubbornness, pride; these are choices that in Eden we are absent. 

We declare our allegiance to our chosen solitary path.  Say the temptation to kill, to hate, to sin was gone.  Our thoughts would be in halves.  Say thoughts were merely what God allowed and that is all we knew.  Then there is no balance for in the core of God is forgiveness, is redemption, and is salvation. 

How can we or God in human-form exist without the inherent choice to sin?  The greatest of all human qualities we can flourish is to forgive those who have wronged us.  We save in duality.  This is our human pinnacle.  We too have the choice, which side of forgiveness we will be on. 

We are not perfect as a biblical Christ.  We commit errors.  We have faults.  We fail, not only by sin, by our human standards of success in our jobs, on our games, in our tasks.  (To catch the ball, to get the answer correct, to say the right words, to do it faster)  We are flawed.  We are flawed together.  In these flaws we are bonded with God in our humanity to forgive others and ourselves. 

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It is ok to be flawed.  We uncover opportunities to recognize our interconnection in embracing suffering and failure.  I forgive myself.  I forgive Arthur Andersen, Stam and Jenkins.  I forgive myself for not defending myself, for tennis balls and turning the wrong cheek.  I was a kid who made mistakes.  I forgive myself for the pain of feeling alienated for years because I did not want to smile, because I got in a fight in junior high and did not want to throw a punch, because I was afraid of rules and my teeth blasted out my skull.  I forgive my flipper denture.

I viewed myself as victim.  I separated myself from humans in junior high and high school.  No one can possibly understand a fourteen year old.  I felt I could not kiss anyone because my flipper would fall out.  Sidney dumped me.  It was ok to not understand how to feel. 

I forgive myself for not understanding.  I forgive myself for not recognizing how my words impact others.  We are flawed.  Outlanders write in gerrymandered pretexts.  I forgive myself for every bad day until I met Ashley and my life finally blossomed. 

I see Ashley as human grace and weakness to curve my own.  I am partner to complete a hemisphere into a whole of God’s work.  We are meant to envelope ourselves into his giant sphere of intermingled life.

We have the gift of presence, to move and choose.  The point of life can not be such a game of offense and defense of netting out good deeds with bad deeds like bartered yard lines.  We can not pretend to total up the tasks and net above a scored number then declare to be saved.  Human terms require scoreboards.  How we run is more important than the distance.

We each are measured in infinite eternity in small and major ways that only God can contemplate in the iterations of our effect on every other mechanism in the linked chain that represents everything in God’s quicker than a blink universe of God.

There are moments of our frailty with dramatic concrete impact.  In part we sin.  We fail.  We disappoint, but it is in our response to our failings and those who fail us and others that we are truly measured in a lifetime of consequence of daily responses and recognition.

There is a balance in God.  For us to feel there is a constant trial is to stare too close at the Notre Dame cathedral and to see a brick.  We are living examples, living statements that in God’s dimensions our lives expand in inconsequential time, yet consequential choice.  Choice is the only separation in the two-sided coin of God and us; of our fallible insignificant selves, and infallible gift-giving, choice-giving God.
       
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God is not a member of a single religion, for he is not man.  He is in the people everywhere including the religious and non-religious.  It is in this commonality that we usurp the flawed grasps of claiming any religion has the answer that must be communicated in a paradigm that serpentines its way unique amongst all the other religions in every universe to supplant its foothold on the pedestal of religious supremacy.  This zenith is an irrelevant human pursuit ignoring the common victory evident in the choices we are born with.

Although the choice is a gift, it is our own.  It is the essence of Eden.  It is the root, the spawn of opportunity for forgiveness.  It is what separates God from the nothingness Christians label as Satan.  It is ultimately what determines our salvation, our choice to choose God, to choose to prosper to choose a duty to that which is beyond our immediate.

We idolize Eden, yet posses Eden in ignorance.  This life is a better double hemisphere world.  A world of flaws bears witness to a world of forgiveness which is truly a greater gift than a garden of half-transparent perfection. 

I wrote this soliloquy to myself and felt the walls sweating.  Maybe there was hope. 

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I went to dinner sitting across from my father and a man and his sons from St. Bernard Parish and white-shrimp-boot Louisiana.  We passed pasta and meatballs practicing sign language and the command not to say hello.  Saturday came and through the little moments of scripture reflection I found various moments to sit with and find myself and write.

God creates us in a constant process that appears to take countless lifetimes.  The grandeur is not measureable in any infinitesimally small amount of our dimension of time.  To all creation the width of our life, to learn, to understand, is not measured by time’s fourth dimension, but by choice.  Choice is the only gift which we can be certain.  We can not know which choice to select, but we can know that the choice is there to be made. 

To think being close to God must take years is to overlook the point.  God is always there, for time is our constraint, not his.  If we decide to take decades to make a choice we could have made in two seconds fifty years ago than that is our choice.  God provides us the constant option to choose to live with him at various points; the whole time or at the end or never.  

We err to frame a choice as it is too late or it is too soon to make and thus not a choice.  Possessions, friends, family, our choice, how will we live this time?  I chose to be happy.

To feel I solved all my ills or troubles in hours seemed silly and a bit egomaniacal, but the point of deep reflection brought cathartic insight.  I felt closeness and a joy I had not felt in years.  The naps were nice.  

“The house of silence and sacred sod where nobody speaks to anybody and everybody speaks to God” Louis Yarrut.

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The retreat helped me realize a new vision of justice.  God can not receive by definition.  He is and has created all there is.  I guess that would include the devil, the antithesis, the option to that, which is against God.  But, I don’t believe in the devil.  Since God can not receive from us it is God who has an unlimited supply of gifts to give.

In the story of the prodigal son, the son who squanders his share is rejoiced upon return.  The son who was always there need only ask.  In this I see in part a separation between human paradigm and God.  There is a lack of a zero sum game in God’s world, which humanity ignorantly views as a zero sum.  When the prodigal son returns, he is with God.  God has limitless blessings that he expounds upon each of us.  It is human to say out of some sort of human jealousy he got more than me and I was better is frivolous, because each has access to and is granted a complete and unending bounty.

In the human paradigm there are limits to our human tokens of money, of livestock, and land.  God’s gifts are love, patience, understanding, and forgiveness after true repentance.  We should not hold elements of sin, like jealousy, anger and hate because it only severs our innate mutuality.  When we sin, we only injure ourselves.

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I thought, wrote and bound my speech.

Given enough patience leaves in a forest fall like rain.  The foliage comes down in wondrous showers, in an act of suffering for purpose.  Human-tactile pain is temporary.  Love is so powerful to not suppress a negative but to extol the power of God’s forgiveness through our own forgiveness of others.  All is not accomplished in our physical form. 

God did not become “human” on Earth in body to the age of ninety or three hundred and write everything down for us or give us a video tape of him giving sight to a blind man curing the world’s diseases , providing limitless food. 

Could he have?  Did he want to?  Did he come at all?  Did he need to?  The Bible’s Jesus asked his dad if there was a divergent path for human-kind’s salvation.  God does not offer one hundred percent doubting-Thomas fixed truth for a reason. 

We would disband the requirement for faith and thus the inherent value in the freedom of choice.  We would be made drones or slaves or choice-less obedient followers.  If God wanted mindless slaves to worship and adore him he could do that by simply making his presence universally apparent and stating consequences clearly. 

Bow to me and praise my name at least thirty-three times an hour or you will starve or be burned or perish or be called a stupid-fucker forced to lick ash-white dog-shit.  Faith would be irrelevant.  Free-will and choice would be irrelevant.  Diversity of human-kind would be placated by blind obedience. 

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We are given the ability to comprehend information about God through our conscious thought, not from religion.  We are not animals as squirrels or dogs.  We are provided with the ability to contemplate, to bear witness to share in the realization of God’s presence by the concept that there must have been something outside nothingness to create existence from nothingness. 

The classic cosmological argument has been made by Plato, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas centuries ago.  Theists contend God is still present post creation.  Deists contend for the absentee landlord. 

Hawking or some other theoretical physicist may have called for two pieces of anti-matter or membranes colliding to creating matter in our universe.  We can ask our conscious-self what preceded our big bang. 

There could be countless universes created under some other dimension of membrane creating infinite universes parallel to our own.  Imagine the billions of other iterations of the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran and their legalistic mandated anecdotes.  Would we laugh or follow?  What of their kitchen table conversations?

Science does not disprove the concept of a classic cosmological argument, only a rational for an explanation other than God.  A non-caused force still must have caused the creation of any anti-matter or extra membranes colliding, but I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher. 

With this consciousness we are given the corollary responsibility to utilize the gifts God has given to us in imitation of his example.  Jesus. Allah, Buddha, the Father, God, gains nothing by our blind obedience.  God gains nothing.  We gain. 

We have everything to gain.  We share in God’s omnificent awesome goodness as part of God as an interconnected one.  We share it with each other by giving and forgiving and in that there is good.  In that there is purpose.  In that we fulfill a purpose and the reason for existence. In that we find the meaning of life.

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I drew this diagram for myself.  Maybe it made sense to me in that moment.  Who the fuck knows?

God equals infallible in the absolute.  God has no fault.  All below God is fault in God’s creations.  Humans and higher-evolved complex life on other planets are able to understand.  Nonhumans and other noncomplex life are unable to understand.  Forgiveness is the closest act to resemble God.  If the separation between God and God’s creation is fault, God is the ultimate forgiver.

Redemption is the counterpart to forgiveness.  It is an honest request for forgiveness.  In the essence of the act of forgiveness the at-fault must request forgiveness by free choice.  Otherwise there is no corollary of redemption. 

If God was one hundred percent evident to humans as God in the human paradigm through our five senses in a one hundred percent comprehensive and indisputable evidence for each of us for all time without contradiction; we lose free choice.  Freewill is no more.  Thus by definition if we were choice-less, we could not fault, we would be God.  Thus we as humans would cease to have a purpose of existence; no reason and no meaning for life.  But because we can fault we have a purpose. 

God is perfect and is boundless in his bounty, because God cannot choose.  Choosing requires time, which God does not have, for God exists outside of existence, independent of time.  We must choose.

God can receive nothing that God does not already possess the ability to create in an infinite fashion or have from us.  Therefore we are the recipients of the purpose of our God-like ability to forgive.  We benefit from the act of asking for redemption from God and others and providing forgiveness to others.  We fulfill the duality of our human role, our two-sided coin: our human side to fault and seek redemption and our God-like side to forgive ourselves and others.

Thus we have purpose and meaning in our existence.  We are imitations of God in the essence of forgiveness.  We are God for one another.  Some see the pain and horror of death and sin in the world and contemplate why doesn’t God fix that?  Why did God put that in the world?  Is that God’s gift? 

What God did was put me here.  He put each of us here to act as him, to aid, to help, to forgive with in the constraint that the human body is not the be all construct of our purpose, yet wields the freedom of time itself to consummate the illusion of choice foreign to God.  If our body fails, if we have disease that ends our life or the lives of the one that we love “prematurely” or after one hundred years or another human murders us or the one we love; the pain is a constraint to the deeper meaning that the purpose of our human lifespan as a conduit to fulfill the duality of forgiveness and to be as “God-like” as possible is temporary.  These bodies are vessels of impermanence.   Earth and humanity are secondary.

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God is eternal and when this temporary part ends maybe the consequences unfold into eternity.  Maybe we rejoin God in a fuller, complete sense outside the justice-thirst of a human paradigm.  Maybe we retain our human ability to fault.  Maybe we absorb in as part of God.  If we retain the ability to fault, we may be able to retain our sense of self, but we may be closer to God than we are now with abilities to understand and bond with God in a way our human paradigm can not.  Maybe there is fucking nothing.  Maybe there is an infinite congregation of every aware-species from every planet and universe.

This new found level may be a corollary to the difference on Earth between human and animals; to be close to God.  Maybe in the concept of a “heaven” or after the “heaven” there is another level, not yet God, and a level beyond and beyond and closer and closer.  Just as there may be infinite universes beyond our own, there could be infinite levels of existence or maybe not.  Maybe we are already as far as we will ever be or need to be.  Resolving the what-if is irrelevant.  Either way intermixed in all of it is God or a big who-gives-a-fuck void, but we innately know right and wrong.  The how we live whether there is a bonus round prize or penalty or not is the only relevant factor.

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Evolution from non-human to human from the revelation beyond ignorance from non-understanding to understanding from non-culpability for fault because of lack of understanding to fault with understanding mandates us to act.  God provides for each bird and beast and humans in separate but similar capacities, but with parceled culpability. 

Since time is irrelevant to God’s dimensions the time table of human evolution from single-celled organism to larger rat-size mammal to segregate from primates that chose to habitat in trees rather than walking on the ground to become Cro-Magnon man to current man, in all our stages is a structure of events, which God was present.  So at one point there was an Earth with no humans, but God. 

There were dinosaurs.  There were animals, but no being until a given point that had the ability from God to bear an understanding of God.  On other planets and in other universes during all of these stages there probably were beings capable of such comprehension in various parallel stages of evolution.  To think Earth is the “chosen” planet is myopically self-centered.

The first genetic level of human who recognized the fundamental thought that, before the first aspect of anything in any universe or anything of physical presence some being, some force must have initiated that process of matter out from nothingness created the potential for humans to sin.  In that thought humans were granted or achieved from God a consciousness of God.  In this moment we were capable of fault to couple with the capability of choice to posses both sides of the coin. 

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The first fault for any form of being represents the inevitable exit from the ignorance.  The rest of God’s creatures go on in ignorance.  How can we claim a wolf is sinning when it eats a deer or that we are sinning when we kill a cow or deer to eat absent torture?  This process is the absence of fault, because there is no consciousness by the animal of God’s presence, thus no fault.  There is no culpability.  We are culpable when we kill another human, even if it were for the purpose of eating to survive, because the line is the awareness of God.  We are culpable in all forms of torture.

If we consider that at one point we could not sin, then there was no sin because there was no awareness of God, but now we are aware of God.  Clearly there are probably other rare planets out in God’s universe capable of supporting complex life capable of achieving awareness of God.  Thus even if we are so myopic to believe that humans invented or created sin by our first disobedience to God, aware beings were disobeying God long before we came around.  Yet, what is sin, a failure against God or against our being?

We are aware of God.  We have the responsibility with that understanding to be like God and are subject to penalties of our fault, our sin in paradigms beyond our human constructs and within our human construct.  That conception exists independent of anything in the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or any religious tome.  It lives in our gut-consciousness of right and wrong present in the collective and imperfectly reconciled.

In a parallel, just as a baby is born in ignorance, the brain develops, the child learns as he or she ages and there comes a point of awareness of God, awareness of the all, of God’s will and at this point the child is subject to responsibilities of free-will.  The child can then be held to the penalties of his or her choices, for in those actions the child injures itself, by wronging the other.

To know that we stumble, that we are flawed, we make choices that have unwanted consequence.  Sometimes it is beyond our choice.  Just as a sick man dying refusing a doctor’s care for the sake of a miracle; we ignore God by not recognizing the gifts that God has given to us in fellow human beings.  I think most of the gifts God gives us come in ordinary packages intended for others and not necessarily our selves.

For an obligation to forgive, the one who harmed us must seek redemption and vice versa.  There is always duality.  Forgiveness is a pro-active life form birthed by the wrong doer. 

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I thought of my potential child.  I wondered what his or her first look up at me would be like, to see his innocent skin grasp the light of God’s world, to feel her mother’s touch, to hear our voices welcome her, to say his name and know how precious a gift she is to never abandon his side, to teach her, to share, to play, to learn from, to clothe, to pray with, to laugh with, to smile with, to love, to know we are a family, to see her first sin, to see her grant her first forgiveness. 

I wrote to myself.  I will in all my being aid him in his life, give all that I have.  I want to help her learn, to be an example as God is, to be her dad, to help him put his socks on and tie his shoes, even when it is hard.  I will let him be himself at his own pace.  I will teach her our faith, to respect God’s world and other people, to love herself. 

I will teach him that he does not have to be perfect, that no one is, not me or his mother.  I will teach her to listen, to be patient, to respect the limits of others, that she can not always get what she wants and a lot of times she will thank God she did not in retrospect.  I pray to teach him the value of life, the power and significance of forgiveness with his relationship with God and each other. 

I will teach her that her mother and I love her unconditionally without end, the freedom that education provides, that America is both awesome and hypocritically flawed, that he should not eat crayons, that playing with others is fun and sometimes scary.  I will try to teach her good conversational skills, nutrition, arts and crafts, that daddy is always available as her own personal horsey.  I will teach him that there is no end to learning, the fallacies of the media and fearful humanity, to think for him self, that dad is not always right.  I will try to teach her that we all make mistakes, but dad always loves you. 

I will teach him that it is good to be athletic in whatever he can, but she does not have to be the all-star.  Grandpa was not always a bald gray-bearded man, getting to bed on time is important so her brain functions well, that there is no such thing as the boogie man or Santa Claus eventually in a careful conversation on lessons in hypocrisy with truth.  I will teach him that uncles are fun, how to swim, this little piggy, peek-a-boo, making up our own songs, dress up, Easter egg hunts, and her Dutch heritage.

I will teach him to ask questions, to be him self, it is ok to be scarred, everybody is scarred at different times, and being brave helps us grow.  I will teach her to make her own choices, why we learn math and how algebra and geometry use different parts of our brain, a proper perspective on money, to value the differences between people as gifts. 

I will try to teach her to discern right and wrong, look both ways, scary movies are not real, to respect her body, that addictions put something material between us and God.  I will teach him that we are his family, where home is, that there is always hope.  I will teach her that having friends is a good thing, to share, to write, to read, to do math. 

I will teach him to love, to feel safe, to aid his siblings.  I will try to teach her to tell her grandparent’s how great they are, to tell his mom she is the best, to know that we are so glad he was born, and to have special birthdays.  I will teach her that there is only one of you and she is special and can do things in this world that no one else could ever do.  There is a balance and a purpose in what we choose.  

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I thought of so many things on the retreat in all the moments to myself, yet never alone.  I felt close to God, but in a way further from Christianity.  I began to see religion’s arbitrary nature and Jesus as a concept, or a teaching mechanism narrative rather than a mandate, because when I contemplated the logistics of the Christ story outside a Disney reconstruction, the symbolic trumped a historic documentary. 

I could not laugh out loud or emit a sigh of relief for fear of retreat banishment.  That would be like farting in church.  So I just sort of noted to let something out later.  I wrote questions about Jesus and God to myself, some silly, some rhetorical, other serious and like any good Catholic many of them obsessed over sex.  I was such an inquisitive child. 

If you took a sample of Jesus’ DNA is it one hundred percent human; same genetic structure and everything?  So the father part of the DNA is it like anybody else’s?  Is the female part all Mary, or is it like a surrogate birth mother for a pre-fertilized embryo?  If Jesus’ soul was conceived with out sex how did Jesus go through mitosis and meiosis?

Did Jesus have normal sperm?  Were they super powerful?  If Jesus were to father a kid would he or she be part God and would the whole God in three persons be like God in three and half or four persons?  If that kid had kids would it continue the split until it was like God in three trillion persons?

Could Jesus jump up through the atmosphere land on the moon and do jumping jacks like there was normal gravity?  Could Jesus fly around and do everything Keanu Reeves can do in the Matrix, but in real life if he had wanted?

Did Jesus own any pets, like sheep and did he ever lose his sheep or eat his sheep or make a coat out of his sheep’s wool?  Did Jesus go fishing and really try or was he like fish I command you in the nets under his breath and finish early to go relax?

What was Jesus’ favorite food?  Was Jesus allergic to anything?  Did he ever get sick and if he did, did he developed antibodies the same way regular people do?  Did Jesus trim his own hair without a mirror?  Where ever his hair clippings went did that deteriorate into the soil and did it and all his fecal matter and jettisoned skin cells ascend to heaven during the ascension? 

Would Jesus have approved of television and his apostles using television to get the word out?  What about bilking grandmas out of their social security?

Did Jesus play sports in school?  Did he dominate or try to play it off like he was not so talented so the other kids would at least try and wouldn’t say, “Hey that’s not fair you’re the son of God?”  Did he get frustrated from missing out on the fun of always knowing how the games would end?

Did Jesus have a favorite dinosaur?  Was it velocaraptor?  Did Jesus ever tell people about dinosaurs and people were like, “You’re fucking crazy man that is such bullshit.”  If Jesus was not a teacher, a preacher, fisherman or carpenter, what would he have been professionally?

How many years was Jesus in school?  Did he ever get bored of knowing all the answers?  Did Jesus have pimples?  Did he pick at them even though he knew he probably shouldn’t?  Did he feel socially awkward at fifteen and worry about what other kids thought of him?  Did he jerk off?  Did he ever get asked to do drugs?  Did he ever contemplate teenage suicide instead of thirty-three year old semi-suicide?  Was Jesus pro euthanasia since he kind of committed it himself?

Did Jesus conjure up some toilet paper when no one was looking?  Did Jesus ever not hear something somebody said and ask them to repeat it or did he already know what they said and was doing it to act normal? 

Did Jesus ever step on an ant hill and start swatting the ants on his foot to keep them from biting him or was he like, “Get off” and they did?  Why does the Bible bring up historical genetics?

How many times did Joseph and Mary have sex?  How many kids did they want?  How many miscarriages?  How did they handle favorites with a perfect child walking around the hut?  What happened to Mary’s menstruation, is it a holy relic?  Were there any alcoholics at the wedding of Cana and if so did Jesus contribute to their drinking problems?

Did Jesus ever play rock paper scissors?  What would Jesus have to say about Buddha, Ganesh, Muhammad, and other deities?  Could Jesus do math really, really fast like faster than Rain Man or that talking computer IBM put on Jeopardy? 

Could Jesus have built an airplane out of sand and flown around the desert?  Could he visit all the world’s children in a single night? Why didn’t Jesus tell the apostles anything about America?

Did he treat Joseph like a step-dad or a real dad?  Did he call him dad in private?  Did he ever have the awkward conversation of having to tell Joseph he was going to have to start calling him Joe instead of father? 

Would Jesus like it if a fast-food restaurant hired poor people and gave profits to charity if it exploited his image for at least some personal gain to help the impoverished?  What if the food was factory farmed?

Did Jesus know everything there ever was to know inside the womb and at birth and could have fully talked and walked and conversed immediately upon birth if he really wanted to in all languages?  Could Jesus heal really quickly like Wolverine of the X-men if he wanted to or blow eye laser blasts by blinking like Cyclops?

Did Jesus ever skip sleeping for a week?  Was the option there, but he chose not to take it?  Did Jesus ever smoke anything?  Did the apostles ever discover opium?

Did Jesus ever play with the other kids, build sandcastles, play tag, or go through the motions of hide and go seek?  Could Jesus win on Iron Chef?  Would Jesus have been the best artist and put Michelangelo and the other Ninja Turtles to shame?

Did Jesus ever have a wet dream?  What women did he think about?  Did he ever think about men?  Did women have crushes or seduce Jesus?  Did Jesus ever try to suck his own dick?  Did he have signs from God shaped in his pubes or connect the dot acne on his back?

How did Jesus tell women he was taken with the whole got to save the world for sin thing?  When Ashley told me she had dreams about having sex with you, how common is that with women in the world fantasizing about getting it on with J.C.?

Did Jesus tell his donkey to giddy up or could he mentally communicate?  Could Jesus really beat anybody at Tic-Tac-Toe in a fair game with out ties based on pure play skill?  Could Jesus shave his head and grow it back in thirty seconds?

Could Jesus spit in different colors?  Could he poop a rainbow?  Did Jesus really have to take a bath or could he be like, “I am clean” and he wouldn’t smell?  

Did Jesus really have the “Jesus” hippy haircut and buff abs?  Did Jesus have a middle or last name?

If Jesus participated in time travel, could he tip-toe around all the “changing the future” consequences that Michael J. Fox got into during the Back to the Future movies?

If God and the Devil were in an arm wrestling contest, how would the devil try to cheat?  Would God already know?  Would it be like the Princess Bride poison drinking game deal with the Iocane powder?

Did Jesus know about air conditioning and say, “Man this desert is hot, let’s hook up this joint with A/C?”  How do we reconcile Jesus raising Lazarus, fish replication and standard-human ignorant capabilities?

Did Jesus ever vomit or wet the bed?  How much of the Bible is pure bunk?  Made up? Never happened?  How much is local politics?  How much did we mistranslate?  Whatever happened to the gold the magi gave Jesus?  Who does Jesus root for in the Olympic Games?  What made Jesus laugh?  Who assassinated JFK?

Why would angels need wings, couldn’t they just fly like superman?  Will you help the Saints win the Superbowl, please?  What if Jesus’ name was Chuck or Paulie No-Knuckles would we use that?  Does God ever laugh at what we consider national news or how seriously what we think God intended us to understand? 

Did you ever bring back say your daughter, a third cousin or another family member at another time in history or at least think about it and decide against it because we were not ready or did we just not notice very well?  Did we abort her or him?

I have always had a million questions.  I never needed answers, only the freedom to believe that God wanted us to have a sense of humor.  God did not need to be a super human to be omnificent.  God need only be present independent of every folly material construct we cling to for relevance to prove the irrelevance of so many of our fixations.

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We had a final mass and a lunch where the sea king put our voices back in our throats.  My father enjoyed the weekend.  Timothy refueled his soul every year.  This was my first time.  I felt so reassured to be able to focus on my family and my new job at Boudreaux and Borges.  I felt like I put Andersen and Stam and Jenkins behind me. 

I came home to our in-progress house to my beautiful wife.  That night Ashley told me we were pregnant.  Ashley took the test on Saturday while I was at the retreat.  Apparently we hit it out of the park on the first cycle through the batting order.  I was a dad with super-sperm.  When I was writing all that stuff I was a dad.  Ashley wanted to call me while I was at the retreat center so badly.  We invited our parents over for a little impromptu dinner and told them about our peanut in the roaster.  They were ecstatic  
Continue to Chapter 8 

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