Chapter Seven – Bastille Day from
Enron to Acorn and the House of Sacred Sod part 2
211
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?
212
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?
213
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.
214
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.
215
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?
216
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.
217
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.
218
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.
219
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.
220
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.
221
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.
222
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.
223
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.
224
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.
225
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.
226
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.
227
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.
228
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.
229
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.
230
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.
231
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.
232
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.
237
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.
238
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.
239
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
Continue to Chapter 8
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