The post after yesterday's triple-'R' post

An aimless image for an aimless entry. More pen testing.

Dear diary,

Sometimes I love spirituality and sometimes I hate spirituality. Yesterday, while performing routine maintenance on a jet engine, I was listening to a radio program, and the host of this program was talking about his spirituality. This made me hate spirituality. So today I woke up in the same foul mood, with the feeling of intense hatred for spirituality.

I just hate it when someone sez, “The reason my motor coach broke down is that I didn’t meditate serenely enough last afternoon.” — No, the reason your motor coach broke is that you failed to maintain it properly. The engines of motor coaches need routine maintenance just like jet engines. You shoulda let me do the work on your motor coach instead of hiring that other guy. There’s nothing spiritual about this.

Also: if a guy is sitting at a picnic table, and there’s a heap of hamburgers before him — let’s say there’s fifty burgers, total, and they’re stacked in the shape of a pyramid — and then about two or three paces away, chained to a tree, is a starving child; and the child sez to itself: “The reason I am suffering hunger and lacking any freedom of motion is that I need to get right with God, but I hesitate to do so because I’m a stubborn sinner, therefore I deserve to suffer like this” — I would argue hard against this child, saying: “No, the reason you’re enslaved and starving is that your owner, the guy sitting at the picnic table yonder, will not unbind your chains and share his hamburgers.” Then I would retrieve my notebook from its holster, write out a traffic citation, tear off the page and hand it to the child. Then I’d walk over and take a seat next to the picnicker.

“Hi,” I’d greet the man. “What’s your name?”

“Peter Paul Mary and Jesus,” the guy would say. “What’s yourn?”

“I’m Bryan, the tyrannical oligarch,” I declare. “Last name Ray. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.”

Then, after thinking for a while about how to frame my next remarks so that they don’t hurt the guy’s feelings, “May I ask,” I say, “why you treat the kid so cruelly? I mean, why not unchain him and give him a burger — you have enough to feed a small village, here. The little guy’s hungry; I just spoke with him: he told me. Plus it’s not nice to keep one’s employees tethered to the scenery.”

“If I didn’t do it to him,” the man answers, “he’d do it to me.”

Now I raise my right hand & say: “You have won this conversation.” Then I take my leave.

§

And what is so satisfying about business? I understand the attraction of other types of activity, like nursing, because it’s always nice to help sick people get better; but what’s the appeal of sitting at an office desk and making phone calls to potential buyers?

Once the buyer agrees to your price, then you must get up from your comfortable swivel-chair and walk back into the storage room. You must pay attention to the labels on all of the boxes that are kept back there, and find the one that matches your customer’s order. Then you’re stuck spending the rest of your evening driving out to the country, to deliver the buyer’s package. None of these tasks can be assigned to any of the other members of your firm, because this order is important — the rest of your team always screws things up, and, as the saying goes: If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.

Then you arrive at the destination and double-check to make sure the house number is correct. You press the doorbell (while noticing that the door is extremely old — it needs replacing), and a damsel who’s dressed in a French-maid costume answers. So you say:

“Is this Halloween, or are you really a French maid?”

“If it were Halloween, I’d be on the outside begging for candy, not answering the door of the residence. Yes, my family has French roots — that’s my mom’s side (my dad’s side is German) — but this costume does not indicate my profession. Master and I were just playing a kinky dress-up game in the antechamber. How may I help you?”

“I have a package that I’m trying to deliver. Were you the one I spoke to on the phone? I’m trying to find my buyer — I made a sale this morning and, amid all the excitement, I forgot every detail about whoever bought this thing,” (here I hold up the package and shake it,) “except for their house number.”

§

So that’s why business sux. You end up having to argue with every single customer. For instance, in the prime of my life, I worked at a fast-food franchise whose forte was veggie tacos. My job was to take orders at the cash register and then expedite them. So one time this angry guy approaches the counter and sez:

“I got this free coupon. Gimme a taco.”

So I say: “OK, one taco, comin’ up! The cost of your order is exactly one coupon.”

So he hands me his “coupon”, which turns out to be a note that reads:

“I am armed and dangerous.”

Then, after taking a plastic tray from the stack, I walk over to the downspout-chute that extends from the kitchen, and I stand there until a gift-wrapped commodity flies out of the chute and thunks down onto the tray.

Turning around, I face the angry man who placed this order & say “Order number 86 is ready. May God be with you!”

The man takes the tray and goes & sits at a table in the dining area.

I watch the man as he unwraps the taco and frowns. He then stands up and walks back over to me with the tray held out before him.

“Is this your normal routine? Is it your ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, to make food that is filled with poison that will kill whoever eats it?”

I look down at the taco and see that instead of lettuce, there are crisp $100 dollar bills stuffed into the hard-shell.

“You forgot the shredded cheese,” the man explains.

Now, in case it’s not obvious, let me make plain the reason why this confrontation (which was not uncommon) felt so infuriating to me:

This angry customer saw that I, Bryan, the cashier and expediter (as my name-tag specified) was clearly not the preparer of this meal — in other words, I was NOT the cook or chef who made this man’s taco — I never even entered the kitchen area: that’s what the food-chute is for: to keep us all segregated. In fact, not once had I left this customer’s sight, for the duration of his visit — he was able to observe my actions the entire time; from the instant he placed the order till the moment it was served — nevertheless he chose to blame ME for the wrongly made meal.

“I’m terribly sorry about that,” I say. “I will get you another.”

“I don’t want another cheese-free taco. If my desire were for something that does not appeal to my taste, I would have said so at the register.”

“Well then what do you want me to do,” I asked in confusion.

“I want a full refund,” the man said.

So I went back and opened the cash register, and I offered back to the man his handwritten note. But, upon pretending to read its message, this customer lyingly accused me of attempting to threaten his life, so he called the police.

Now two officers come sauntering in thru the entryway of the franchise. They approach me and casually pepper-spray me; then they cuff me and drag me outside and shove me into their cop car (banging my head on the frame as they do so). Then they kill me. But they didn’t intend to; they just took the prank too far.

§

At this point, I want to say something important, to give the entry a little class, but I don’t know what to write. What was the topic again? Spirituality? — Ah, yes, OK: I think I can drum up a good finale along those lines…

Let’s say we’re all in church, praying and singing songs and preaching and speaking in tongues. Also some of us are in the corner, reading the scriptures. Then suddenly the roof starts to creak, and it eventually lifts off and the Holy Spirit descends into the church.

The Holy Spirit stands there before us, gazing at us, while we gaze back. Then one of us musters the courage to address our awesome visitor:

“O Holy Spirit, we welcome you into your home, the Christian Church: You could not have come at a better time, because we all were right in the middle of praying to you and praising you and letting you speak thru us. And some of us were reading about your adventures — cuz we have this book that is a collection of stories that features you, O Great Spirit and Creator of All Existence, as the hero in various conflicts. Like, there’s one tale where you enter a saloon, and there’s a bunch of gangsters at the back table playing a card game for high stakes. And you confront these thugs and take a seat and easily win the game against them. But they won’t let you collect your winnings, because they’re so sore that they lost. (And they were even cheating! That’s how good of a player you are!) So there’s a shootout and you blast them all straight to Sheol. You emerge from the scuffle pristine, as if none of their shots even hit you. There’s smoke and dust that has been kicked up, and all the horses are scared. — And then there’s another tale where you visit a young widow who’s very beautiful (at least that’s how I imagine her when I read the story), and you also go visit a poor sad orphan in the orphanage. And you help these folks: you let them ride on your back, until they get their life in order. You don’t say to them ‘Pick yourself up by your own bootstraps!’ cuz your way is not to yell and cuss at people as if they’re stray dogs or some fool neighbor’s livestock. You’re nice to everybody. You even helped those mean old gangsters who were gambling in the earlier story find rewarding careers. You deputized one of them, and then later he became the sheriff of the town, and all the outlaws really took to him. And after he retired, you yourself become the new sheriff, and you ended up solving a notorious crime — a murder! — by simply planting some evidence at the crime scene. There was a dresser with six drawers in this fella’s house, and you open up the top drawer, just like a pro, and you take something out of your pocket and place it in the drawer and close it back up; then you say to one of the detectives who are there investigating: ‘Hey, Don, have you searched thru this top drawer here?’ And the detective looks up and is like, ‘Huh?’ And you say ‘Don, take the inventory of this drawer.’ And he sez, ‘I already investigated all the details of this room and noted everything down concisely; I’m just finalizing my report so that I can send it to the officials.’ And then you step over and clutch that detective by the neck and you turn him towards you so that you’re facing him grill-to-grill, and you say, real nastly-like: ‘I’m the official. Now check the drawer, Don.’ And the whole darn book is plum full of stuff like that, where you come off as some type of Celestial Bigshot. — That’s why we all love you.”

And the Holy Spirit smiles and comes down into the audience and shakes everybody’s hands, so the whole congregation gets to meet in person the recipient of all their worship.

Yet, since our belief has come true, and there’s no further need for faith because we have facts and science on our side now, we all begin wondering what we’re supposed to do with ourselves, and where we should spend our energies in this glad new context…

Then, perceiving our thoughts before we have even articulated them, the Holy Spirit announces:

“Act the same as before: Keep doing good to one another, and keep attending these church services. You are my faithful ones who were loyal to me before I made myself manifest, and I truly appreciate that. I will grant you blessings that you cannot presently imagine — I haven’t even begun to hand out your rewards. Incidentally, I’m honored that you sing songs to me and pray so much. It’s genuinely appreciated. Your group, among all other earthlings, is the one that pleases me the most. — But I’m still concerned about the rest of the people on this planet, so…”

Then the Great Spirit falls silent and stares at the floor for a very long time, and we all watch and wonder, in awe. No one dares say anything, for fear of jolting the Holy Spirit out of its reverie — we assume that it must be searching for the right word, or the proper turn of phrase, so that it can continue its message to us.

After a while, a few of the womenfolk retire to the back room and begin to prepare some macaroni, because the congregation is famished (it’s nearly seven o’clock, and we usually eat by five). We set up a card table before the Holy Spirit and place a bowl of noodles with cheese in front of it. Its face is still staring intently. We fill its goblet with Shiraz. Then we dish up more noodles and serve the rest of the congregation. We all eat in silence, occasionally looking up to see how the Holy Spirit is doing. It’s definitely alive — it’s got a pulse, plus we can hear it breathing, which sounds rather… it’s hard to describe — it’s like just before a puppy starts to whine: that high whimpery noise that begins at the back of the throat, but very subtle. (You couldn’t discern this if you weren’t leaning close, with your ear about a hand’s-breadth from its blowhole.)