Enlightening Nonsense

While I have given up any interest in attending formal religious services—unless I want to somehow disrupt the event—I do enjoy the Passover Seder at the “X” family’s house. The food is good, the kids are usually somewhat cute and in between daydreaming, I get to test out some of my stand-up material during the service. “I hear when God dumped frogs on the Egyptians as part of the ten plagues that PETA was there protesting Him for cruelty to animals. What a terrific audience thank you very much.” Food, family and usually a discussion on how the Jews can succeed in their plan to take over the world—the only thing missing was masturbating with money and it would be a Jew’s dream evening.

My family considers themselves Reform Jews, which means that after being raised in Jewish Prison for enough years they have “reformed” themselves and, like Mao’s reeducation camps, they now proudly call themselves a Communist, er, Jew. The benefit of being in this least religious sect of the cult of Judaism is that the Seder service is basically the following:

The Jews were slaves in Egypt. Pharaoh oppressed the Jews. Moses said, “Let my people go.” Pharaoh didn’t. Plagues. Pharaoh let them go.

Not too much of that “Hebrew” stuff and those “Blessed are the Lords” repetitiveness—down to brass tacks, baby, like ripping a Band-Aid off—quick and painless. Well painful but just for a split-second.

The Hagadah, known as the “Hag” among the hipsters, is the service booklet you follow. The one we currently use has some more modern comments such as, “Even though the Egyptians were pricks and God drowned them in the sea of Reeds, we don’t think anyone dying is a nice thing, except for maybe Hitler and any other S.S. Nazi bastard or sympathizer. Death to the infidels!”

I was looking forward to this evening because I was bringing my Belarusian girl and it was going to be her first Seder, let alone the first time she was to be surrounded by so many Jews not trying to sell her electronics equipment. By the fifth time she innocently asked, me, “So wait, no one is going to try and sell me a digital camera,” I was ready to try to sell her one myself!

There was one time when I saw her reading along with all the other Jews in the room some Israeli propaganda such as, “And may God bless the people of Israel and always provide protection to them from the stone-throwing Palestinian savages” that my mind wandered, transporting me to Mother Russia where I was sharing a Christmas dinner with her family and as I joined the others in reciting, “We all bow down to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, whose great sacrifice has removed all of our sins and now we no longer need to feel guilty for being born,” I either burst into laughter resulting in the KGB kicking down the door and dragging me off to the Gulag in Siberia or I burst into song from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” resulting in the KGB kicking down the door and doing that kind of kneeling-down-and-kicking Russian dance made famous from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” I think my Belarusian beauty elbowed me when I started to snore. She was clearly more Jew than I’d ever be and I started to fear that if I didn’t watch her carefully, when we got home she would unload her bag showing me two digital cameras that Uncle Heime had sold her telling me in a lilting I-bought-it-on-sale sing-song, “At these prices, how could I resist?”

There is one part of the Seder where the “Hag” gives you advice on how to tell the Passover story to different types of children. There is “The Wicked Child” who is like, “This service is a bunch of crap.” There is the Simple Child who is somewhat like a retard who keeps banging the silverware despite you very patiently yelling at him to “Stop fucking doing that!” There is the Wise Child who is the Dudley Do-Right of the family that needs to be given a Swirly, which entails having one’s head held down in a toilet as it’s flushed. Then there is the Child That Is Too Stupid To Inquire. That child always seems to be taken into the other room by Uncle Ernie and when they both come back Uncle Ernie is innocently zipping up his fly.

I had to interrupt, not with comedy this time but with commentary. “That is a terrible choice of words: The ‘Wicked’ Child. Just because he doesn’t give a shit about the service that doesn’t make him ‘wicked’, per se.” Alright, maybe I was a little sensitive, being somewhat of a “Wicked Child” myself, not so much because I thought labeling a child “wicked” was a potentially scarring event for a young impressionable mind but because I had earned my “wicked” stripes by lighting shit on fire and causing havoc in school and I didn’t want just any “bored with the Seder” Goth kid knocking on my club house door and expecting entrance.

My Mom responded something very teacherly like, “It is probably a poor translation and missing the original essence of what is meant.” I mumbled, “Fuck the Jews,” under my breath, not so much because I hate Jews but because I thought it was just such the “wicked” thing to say and I have a reputation to keep alive.

Somehow we got into a discussion on which child was “better” than the others, putting the “This sucks!” kid versus the “DING!” retard in a death match and thinking that we weren’t the savages. My sister said that clearly The Wise Child was the best. Ivy League, perfect score on the LSATS, Harvard Law School—would it be in “wicked” character to say that she was a stupid bitch and just didn’t get it and then to follow this with an hour dissertation on how our educational system is creating a lot of brilliant morons? Awesome!

The point of that section is to acknowledge that each child (or adult for that matter) is unique and has to be dealt with in his or her own unique way. No child is better or worse than another. Sure the child who is lighting the drapes on fire or the child who is constantly stabbing his fork into his eye may fry your nerves a little more than the goody two-shoes sitting up straight and suggesting, “Mummy, you sit down and take my piece of matzo, as you have been running around all evening. I’ll handle the dishes.” But that doesn’t make that fag dishwashing pussy any better than the other kids. Just someone who if I get alone I will Swirly, that is, if I’m not busy getting blown by the deaf mute idiot who is “Too Stupid To Inquire.”

When you punish and reward children by their behavior you create a type of child who behaves like a robot because he has developed a self-esteem that is dependent on performance and how others view him. This results in the type of adult like my client who makes over a million dollars a year and becomes clinically depressed when business is slow. If your kid comes in 6^th out of six kids in the race, as long as he had a good time why wouldn’t you be happy? He’ll probably be miserable because you and his teachers have taught him that his self-worth is based on his performance and how he COMPARES.

How many of us have heard a story about a jerk father who coaches his kids basketball team and trounces the other team by 100 points, leaving all the members of the other team in tears. I will bet you that almost 100% of the time that “coach” was a shitty player himself as a kid and now he is trying to reclaim his glory thirty years later with his own son. You already blew your life, jackass; leave your son to live his own.

This is also the crime that religions commit when they teach that are ultimate goal in life—well, most actually teach our ultimate goal in life is to die—is to be a cookie-cutter replica of some person who may or may not be mostly fiction. To be another Jesus is A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. To be an original you is a blessing not only to yourself but to the whole world. Just like no two snowflakes are identical, no two children are identical either. Stop friggin’ sucking their individual spirits dry with your poison, you good-meaning but stupid parents, you evil, perverted, fear-mongering religions.

My Mom once told me that one of her big goals with us kids was to have us be able to walk into any room and feel comfortable, having a strong enough self-confidence that we didn’t feel the need to apologize for Who We Are. She said with a smile that I definitely lived that way. I attribute this NOT to how I was raised but IN SPITE OF IT. My parents did the best they knew how to do but it was still mostly based on, “Oh, what a pretty drawing, Sally. You’re a good artist!” and “Little X, how many times do I have to tell you to not to urinate in the car’s gas tank! That’s a bad boy!” To this day I hold a grudge for being called “Sally.”

And really, who the fuck is the “Hag” to start telling us how to talk to our children anyway? Unlike Elijah, I didn’t invite you into my house, bitch! Stick with telling the story of the oppressed Jews so they can feel a common bond in misery but don’t tell me how to talk to my child, you prick. If my child tells me, “This service is a bunch of crap,” I’ll tell him, “That’s your opinion, X Jr., and I won’t ever try and change you for being you.” Of course I will be in agreement with the little bastard.

“To be a Christian is ugly; to be a Christ is beautiful. To be a Buddhist is ugly; to be a Buddha is beautiful.”

–Osho

I went to a Meet-Up group event that involved doing yoga for an hour followed by a raw food potluck, where all the hippies smoke pot and strip down in the raw. Unfortunately, I was the only hippie and when I raised the ganja and dropped the drawers, let us just say that after this point no one touched the sprouted mung bean hotdogs.

The yoga class was a very good class—if you were an absolute beginner who never took a yoga class in your life. The instructor broke down positions, paying attention to specific details that I generally don’t give a shit about but I suppose someone else might. For those who do yoga, the class amounted to about an hour of Cat/Cow and one Sun Salutation. But despite being taught out of a textbook entitled “Yoga For Retards,” I got one of the best learning’s in yoga that I have had in awhile.

Now think of this, if you went to a checkers workshop hoping to stretch your checkers muscles and the instructor was like, “You see, these are the RED pieces. RED is a color. It is lighter than the other pieces, which are the BLACK pieces. BLACK is also a color—well, some would say not a color, but a shade. BLACK is darker than RED,” you would probably upturn the checkers sets, flipping all the pieces—both the lighter RED and darker BLACK—on the floor in frustration, the same way you did when you lost to your mother for the first time and shouted, “YOU SUCK!” and ran out of the room crying. In my defense, it was ping-pong and not checkers and she did suck.

Anytime a thought came up in my head like, “Is ten minutes discussing how to stand up with our feet together really necessary??” I would simply let it go and keep my attention on my breathing and imagine an image of my beloved guru. “Standing has been used throughout the ages as a variation to sitting.” Deep breath in…my beloved…”When one stands he is taller in stature, unless the chair he happens to be on is really, really high…” Deep breath out…my beloved…

And while my physical body wasn’t pushed much beyond what it gets from an hour of sitting on my couch and reading conspiracy theories, my being was beaming, for it was given the leading role for a change while my body was relegated to one of the chorus girls.  And this is a huge lesson: It is not what you DO that matters, it is WHO YOU ARE which is of importance. This tends to be forgotten when the focus of yoga has tended to be on performance instead of self-awareness.

Whenever I ask a first-time Swami X-er about her experience with yoga, she inevitably seems to apologize and beg my forgiveness for not being a better yogi, as if it is a sin not to be able to touch your toes or hold your balance. Instead of exploring and experiencing yoga, they look at me like one of their fake saviors who can remove all their non-existent sins without any work on their part. Maybe I’ll hire some perverted “assistants” to whom they can confess and have their little boys molested. At least at my church I won’t pretend that it is a “spiritual” act designed to save his cherry ass from Satan; I will call it what it is: rape, technically sodomy, as statistics have shown that only one in five little boys have a vagina.

“You should know a tree by its fruits,” said Jesus. He was wrong. We don’t have the eyes to see beyond the fruit, so we judge the tree by its fruit alone, with the understanding that a fruitless tree is worth less than a tree that bears fruit. And it’s not. Whether you’re comparing your fruit to the rest of the yoga community, to your co-workers or to society as a whole, your “tree” is unique and incomparable, regardless of whether you can quote something to the contrary in a “holy” book or not.  

An apple tree doesn’t compare itself with a fig tree. “You call those fruits? Ha! They’re so small!” A fig tree doesn’t compare itself with an oak tree. “What the fuck can you do with an acorn anyway? Oh, you’re right, you can feed them to squirrels. Wow, you’re really going to win a Nobel Prize for that.”

The trees all know that as long as you are in touch with your Authentic Self it is impossible to compare one unique snowflake with another besides in the grossest form: both are made of snow and are created when God scratches his balls. When you are in touch with your Authentic Self, it doesn’t matter whether you are doing a headstand or standing on a street corner, whether you are a raw food vegan or a cow-slaughtering carnivore, whether you sit on a meditation cushion or sit on the lap of a rapist priest.

This is why our world is having such trouble finding peace as a unified forest. They see union as “uniform,” where every tree is an exact clone of its neighbor and, needless to say, the only way for that kind of union is through domination, suppression, oppression—and genetic engineering. Union doesn’t mean you dissolve your unique Self into another, it means you both are at peace with each the other being different and actually encourage the other to be her own unique expression; sounds like the exact opposite of corporate religion.

They say Islam translates as “peace” and Christianity is about “love.” The way these corporations are “practiced” is that unless you believe exactly what they believe, they’ll put a Jihad on your ass or you’ll burn forever in fake Hell. If I were Muhammad or Jesus, I would come back and say, “I love you in spite of the fact that you are all morons and misinterpreting my words.”

I stayed in touch with my Authentic Self in “Yoga For Retards.” And with a little self-study and appreciation even a brassiere can become, in the words of the record-holder for shortest stint as a bra salesman, George Costanza, “Two loops in the back…two cups in the front. Wow!”