How to assemble a Paul Bot: Step 4

     While waiting for the inevitable ejection from public school by way of forced graduation or viscous expulsion, you had other things to do. Better things, like get back to figuring out what your tuning fork to the heart of the universe was. What phrase is this, you ask? Well earlier in your life you were weighing the options of what it was that would make you complete, what is it that you can do that no one else can do quite like you? Then, your possible answers were diverse and nowhere near firm, but now with a little more experience and new revelation you had figured it out. You had done a complete internal check of all your spiritual compartments and determined what it was that would follow your name and a semi colon. For some of us it was Sally: Artist, some Bobby: Musician, others Sherry: Teacher, and on and on. At this point in your life you had opened up the Christmas present of the soul and realized what role it was in this world you were intended to play, you discovered what your tuning fork was that would allow you to exist in perfect pitch with the vibrating tone of the universe in harmony. With this tuning fork to the heart of the universe clear in your mind you were sure that with it you would change the world forever and forever set a legacy which for generations would be examined and studied in awestruck amazement. Your course was set in this life and the sails need but come down so your journey may begin, but first…it’s time to party. Yes what better way to spend your latter teenage years than in a complete and total raging blur where you and your buds competed for who could make not only the dumbest life decisions possible, but make them in a consecutive, rapid fire successions? Within that span of fuzzy years you got your first DUI, found out the D.A.R.E. instructor hadn’t been entirely honest about a great many things, got your first crap job (you know, the one where no matter how hard you tried you still went home with pizza sauce all over your khakis), met back up with that bully and this time you beat the insecurity out of him, and somewhere in there managed to get everything wrong about the opposite sex. It’s okay if you just said out loud that you still do.

    You got a giggle when your GED results came back saying that you scored higher than nearly one hundred percent of people who had actually graduated from high school but your levity would not last long. Little pieces of paper that said “amount owed” and “past due” started coming in the mail with your name all over them and to your astonishment the world was not waiting outside the school yard with outstretched arms filled with your dreams readymade and worry free. No, you were getting your first dose of “This is nothing like what I expected” and it was looking like that tuning fork to the heart of the universe thing was going to have to take a back seat for just a teeny tiny bit while you scrambled for some sort of trade in order to maybe one day have more diversity in your dinner choices besides shrimp or beef Raman noodles. It was certainly not your first, best destiny, as a wise man once said; however you managed to latch on to a secondary skill you possess and with it secured a menial job.

Let’s face it. In America today you more likely than not work for a very big corporation or chain that spans the globe and are about as important to the functioning of that mechanism as something that isn’t really all that important at all in regards to the mechanism functioning. You show up day in and day out giving the only precious commodity you have in this life, namely time, as a trade off for pieces of paper that are purchasing less and less each and every day, barely able to tolerate the space in your life between nine and five all so someone else can get filthy rich off your back and everyone else’s back that actually runs the company. In the words of a really rugged looking, denim from head to toe wearing, lesbian native American shaman I met in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart once: You are a worker bee. The intentions of getting back on that tuning fork thing faded more and more as time went by and the short term plan was becoming the long term plan. Your journey had come to a complete halt and now you were on the treadmill known as living from paycheck to paycheck.

There isn’t much time to indulge in the right brain whenever you live from paycheck to paycheck. The only thing your mind can really focus on is this tightrope that life had become and simply trying to survive so for a people like us it’s like being sedated. We are here but we are not here. However you being you, still the inquisitive one, began to question why it was that a structure in the world of the “workforce” you were now a part of was eerily similar to the one you had not too long ago escaped. It was your attitude that when you showed up to work the agreement between you and your employer was this: you show up for X amount of time and do X task repetititvly and in exchange for the time it takes to do that you would be paid X amount of dollars. At no time was this relationship to be construed in such a way where the employer mistakenly fell under the impression that he owned you or could treat you in a disrespectful or demeaning way without the clear understanding that he would be told where to shove the job. That’s just the way you see it. You are there to make money and that is the only reason you are there. The mega corporation you work for is not your life and once you clock out you could care less if their stocks go up, down, left or right. You still have to call some people “Guy” when you see them in the hall because even though you’ve worked with them for years you just can’t justify taking the time to remember their name. That’s how little your job means to you which is why it completely breaks your mind’s heart when you see those people at work who absolutely eat, drink, and breathe their job. They quote company policy like a deacon from the first Baptist building and connect their personal self worth to how well the numbers are up. You see these people actually become emotional over issues at work and react with the teary eyed performance of a golden globe nominee in the event that get “written” up or sent to the bosses office. At the workplace you can also find the fellow employee that always seems to hover over you, put down your work, point out when you uniform is disheveled and is constantly making idle threats about your job security. This too is not entirely alien to you but this time rather than leaving them scars which will forever make them wake on random nights at two in the morning with night terrors, you choose to just ignore them and vent by ridiculing them to other coworkers who have felt the accidental spraying of unknown fluids by the flopping douche was just as annoying as you. Though you had yet to realize it, the dark cloud that was continually waiting to hover over you each and every morning when you opened your front door was simply doing so because at some point this process of nine to five without your tuning fork to the heart of the universe became normal to you. You became acclimated to the notion that it was probably just a pipe dream anyway, after all none of your family or friends were really supportive of your endeavors to do it for the rest of your life anyway. You seem to remember how when you would talk to them passionately about embracing your tuning fork to the heart of the universe and the plans you had for the future, the only reply you received from many of them was “Yeah, but what are you going to do if that doesn’t work out? I mean, I’m not trying to piss on your parade but what you’re talking about doesn’t really sound realistic now does it?” With such a cloud of encouraging voices all around you it would appear that the routine of your life from this day forward was pretty much set in predictable stone after monotonous stone. Facing this as reality, the hollow in your stomach only grew larger and larger and you thought that perhaps it was time to find peace with your mundanity. Perhaps it was time to get you some religion. Maybe the people who in the worship centers would have answers as to why you were here and what you were suppose to be doing because though when you were a teenager you thought you had it figured out; now you were completely dumbfounded on what the point was. Now what you really needed was spirituality, not religion. Unfortunately though, you were new at this type of thing and didn’t know any better so this next stage of your life was probably inevitable.

Some of you couldn’t do this depending on your upbringing, but the rest of us naturally gravitated to the religious trappings most common to our cultural upbringing. It’s just more natural. Though you were curious how it was that these guys running the worship centers would know more about the meaning of life than you, seeing as how they got here the same way you did and could only have learned what they learned by experience like everyone else, you are willing to lay this aside and poke about for answers within the maze of the theological spin rooms. Reading through the ancient text your preferred religion purports to represent, you dig it. You dig it a whole lot. It tells the really amazing story about good and evil on an inter-cosmic scale with interdimensional repercussions between two forces with very antagonistic agendas and caught right smack in the middle, with soul weighing in the balance, was little ole you. The text spoke of things like hope, love, peace, joy, gentleness, meekness and doing unto others and so forth and you can see that the author of said text really knew what He was talking about. With every book, chapter and verse you are washed over with the philosophy that says in a rolling neon sign that the most important thing in the universe is the individual with free will. Any which way you slice it, this text is telling you that mankind was meant to be diverse and free so that diversity could be explored and expanded upon. There were suppose to be as many different types of personalities in the world as grains of sand in the desert so that there could equally be as many different points of view because only within an infinite amount of points of view can the universe even begin to be properly perceived. This spoke to your core because if there is anything you have definitely known to be true from the moment you gave your mom a valid reason for beating you for the rest of your life via child birth, you have known that if there is anything that describes you it is the word individual. Adding more to your enthusiasm is that the bad guys in this inter-cosmic war’s sole reason for mucking everything up is to strip away every bit of freedom and individuality in the world by way of forced conformity and global uniformity meaning you are a good guy. This religion thing seems to be going well. You have read the text book so now it was time for class.

It didn’t take long before the interactions you had with the other members of the worship center began to disturb your perception of this whole thing. It was difficult to determine one person’s personality, opinions, and world views from another and from another’s from the man behind the skinny tall desk. It was nagging you that what you were seeing was nothing less than the religious leaders interpretation of the texts being assimilated by the members of the worship center and this whole thing seeming skin crawlingly familiar to Borg assimilation of numerous individuals into a single uniform being, oh and by the way why is this place set up exactly like a court room? Even with these little invisible splinters stuck in your shirt tag scratching at the back of your neck agitating your mind, you weren’t about to actually address any of these concerns because come on we are talking about God here. This is no time for questioning its only time for mindlessly ignoring obvious contradictions and calling it faith. Now just sit there and shut up while you obey the Lord and fork over your money to a bunch of old men who call buying brand new organs no one will ever play God’s work. God’s work is talked about a lot at your worship center but you can never figure out what work they are doing besides showing up a few times a week and talking about doing the work of God. You also don’t get what this whole “God has a racially specific chosen people” thing is about when the text is blatantly clear that all men are created equal but this too you sweep under the rug of critical thinking and chalk it up to thinking that maybe your religious leader just knows a little more than you do and if I started asking questions I might come off as stupid.

The straw that finally made the camel apply for disability was when they tried to feed you the ideology of government having the stature of God. They actually expected you to believe that the people who were in the halls of your government who take your money by threat of force and give it to the wholesale slaughter of unborn babies, fund wars on countries that you have never even heard of, imprison every young black man that fits the description of a young black man for walking around with a harmless plant in their pocket are actually put there by the will of God. The kicker was that you were expected to believe that it was righteous and holy to obey them and in fact if you did you were earning brownie points because it was just like you were personally obeying God. With that, you had had enough and decided that from then on you would simply go with the text and the only person you really trusted to be your spiritual leader which just so happened to be you. As expected by your experience with this type of thing, shortly after sticking your head up to ask questions about many of these things you were labeled a heretic and asked to kindly not come back to the worship center. We don’t need any boat rockers in our 501-C3 of tranquility. Once on your own and free from the bars of propaganda that had been designed to make you feel that there was an Eternal Being who created you and loves you and also happens to be a thought policeman that is just waiting for that thought the worship center deems “unholy” so He can unholster his celestial taser and shock you back to filtering your thoughts through the prism of your worship centers executer, you come to find on your own that the only thing you truly have to grasp in order for everything else to click into place is grace in all its myriad rays of light. If there is any universal key to the hot rod of the galaxy you’re going to have to crank that sucker with grace.

To be concluded…

D.L. Crumpton