Okay, maybe McDonald's, Starbucks, or Taco Bell won't be penetrating the Vatican's walls anytime soon, but if they do, I don't think it would take much for them to rewrite... or repaint history.
On my disbelief at the MJ Memorial Lottery and the irreverent wonder at hotel breakfast bar enthusiasts.
We often turn to each other and snicker upon hearing of the entreprenurial opportunist who sees Jesus in a Ruffle and sells it on eBay. We often split our sides at claims of Christ on a cracker, the Virgin Mary Rice Krispie square, or the incidental rendering DaVinci's Last Supper on a mold formation in month old cottage cheese. The sad truth is, it's quite obvious the person selling the product is not a "true believer". If so, how could these latter-day Merchants at the Temple bring themselves to sell what could very well be akin to the Ark of the Convenant?
Even those that consider themselves religious refuse to get caught up in the divine delectables, the holy hors d'oeuvres, the beatific breakfast sausages that draw so much closing story fodder on nightly newscasts while every "Dan Anchorman" wannabe echoes a couple of light chuckles as they go to the wide shot of the Action 5 News Team enjoying the joke. But someone's not laughing, because, on eBay, people are actually bidding on this stuff.
You may think yourselves above such digestible miracles, but even in your Doubting Thomas ways you may be an active participant in a cult-like subset of the Church of Food.
Are you padding down from every hotel/motel room you've ever stayed in, before you've checked out, showered, or sometimes even dressed, to share in the bounty that is the complimentary hotel breakfast? At what cost in time and effort are you willing to buy-in to the word "FREE" while skittishly glancing around the sunroom to observe those shoving individually-wrapped muffins, sickly bananas, orange juice concentrate, and dishwater coffee down their sullied maws.
People will sacrifice hours of needed sleep and waste up to an hour meandering amidst the soma-like trance fields that are the hotel breakfast nooks. They'll bitterly complain later in the day that their road trip driving sessions are going too late into the night, forgetting the cultural Mecca they participated in that same morning at tiny round bistro tables made cozy by the warm glow and hum of microwave ovens.
But nowhere is this devotion to ritual so evident than people who will line up for hours waiting their turn for the malted Belgian waffle iron to be free. These are people who would never go out and just buy a freakin' Eggo once in a while, but instead shamble wearily in the queue, like breadline comrades in Iron Curtain Warsaw. They mutter obscenities under their breaths at the mother who spends double the necessary time explaining the process to her four year-old while trying to soothe the crying jags at not being able to fill a bowl with a generic Froot Loop substitute and throw them around the room. They secretly wish death upon the doddering senior who has to peer intently to decipher the instructions before calling over a companion to ask them what to do next. They seethe with rage at the person who isn't immediately present at the waffle iron upon the completion of their batter press session - to tired to yell, too polite to open it and steal it, to exasperated at the 38 minutes they've been standing in line while their partner has the kids packed up and is honking the horn outside the window, they grimace and direct elaborate sneers of disdain worthy of someone who molested a child.
This is what we've become. We want our ten cent portion of waffle mix SO BAD that we are willing to waste far more valuable time to attain it. We'll gladly spend $20 extra for a hotel room that doles out $5 worth of high fructose gluten in the morning. We're willing to shave hours off of well-needed sleep to rush down to mingle with the Morlocks so that one day we will be able to tell all our friends how worthwhile an experience our travel breakfasts were. Not that far from the devotion of the eBay divine potato chip purchaser, where they've traded money for a chance at getting closer to their creator, you've traded time to stuff your craw.
In the end, they'll have a chip that looks like Jesus... or more likely the Shmoo, while you'll have a twelve hour window to get to the next motel so that you can befoul the bathroom with what passes as pungent remnants of a "healthy" breakfast, grab a five hour sleep, and be ready to be down in the foyer for 9am the next morning, or at least before the last stale croissant is put away.
In the name of the Fritter, the Bun, and the Whole Wheat Toast, as it was in the beginning, finishes by 9:30am, checkout at noon. Alpen.
P.S. Across Canada on Canada Day, all Mandarin Chinese Buffets served free meals. Nice gesture. Kudos to the owners. And the cult descended:
"The restaurant's first customers for its Canada Day (Wednesday) buffet lined up at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night, say staff who saw them then and let them in the next morning. Yesterday afternoon, a line of several hundred people wound around the plaza. Many of the 1,600 people who ate there yesterday waited for several hours."
Some people waited overnight, over 12 hours, in a concrete parking lot for a buffet that costs $16.99 - largely middle-class people, forgoing the better part of a day for a free meal.
via youtube.com
As I prepare to kick back for a couple of months and take time away from sitting behind a "real" desk, I can't help but think emu's, abandoned offices, and Tom Waits - not necessarily in that order.
I.
Thou shalt not try to convince me there is a God or gods or godesses or demons or devils or cosmic intelligences we surely don't understand. If you want to buy into all of that, go crazy, but leave my realist brain out of your cornfield.
II.
Thou shalt not try to convince me that Prince or the Artist Formerly Known as Sane is a musical god for two reasons. One is contained in commandment number one, and two is that the man, while clearly possessing talent, took a long walk off the pretentious pier long ago and convinced himself he was Aquaman in the process.
III.
Thou shalt not try to convince me that the chemicals in fast food are going to kill me someday. I live in a city that chuffs out more carcinogens a day into the air than you can imagine. I was weaned on the stuff. My body is a chemical factory. When I die, and my body decays in the ground, you may as well salt the earth because nothing is growing there again. And if you cremate me, anyone looking at the smokestack will think that Jerry Garcia's been elected pope.
IV.
Thou shalt not come to a COMPLETE STOP when making a right turn with no stop sign, no oncoming traffic, and no possible reason to slow down to a crawl other than the faint possibility your heart has stopped because you're sneezing from the dust gathered on your living corpse that moves too slow.
V.
Thou shalt not take a look at the Double Gulp Diet Coke I bought at 7-11 and say "How can you drink all of that?" Like anyone drinks! Okay you idiot? Starting with my mouth, ending with my bladder, wash, rinse, repeat! Got it?
VI.
Thou shalt not exclaim, for any earthly reason, "same difference". Other than being oxymoronic, it's just plain imbecilic save for one example: 10 minus 8, 5 minus 3, 2009 minus 2007 is the same difference.
VII.
Thou shalt not try to justify the ingestible viability of any gelatin made from reduced animal hoofs. Oh I know that during the great depression your ancestors may have lived off the stuff along with fatback and pork sausage, but that doesn't change the fact I'd rather eat a dolphin.
VIII.
Thou shalt not try to convince me there are secret conspiracies bent on overtaking the world. Get your head out of your ass and smell the soot and sulphur. There are plenty of completely visible organizations trying to take over the world that have great PR contracts to boot. The fact that anyone believes Britney Spears has talent or that A-Rod is anything but an asshole or that this entire Susan Boyle thing isn't a complete fabrication is definitive proof of that.
IX.
Thou shalt not claim to be good at television trivia without being able to sing at least 20 theme songs, word for word, from the 70s or earlier. You will be excused from one theme for each well-placed reference to the Wondertwins or Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets for all you unbelievers).
X.
Thou shalt not, through any circumstances, under pain of verbal tirade and relentless mocking through a series of pop culture subreferences, fly footloose and fancy-free with the definitive article "the" before things like: Walmart, Twitter, Windows, Google, or Kids Today.
XI.
Thou shalt not expect me to hold to any promises or parameters of only holding to lists of ten things when clearly it's permissible for me to take things to eleven.
XII.
Thou shalt not expect anything less than the unexpected grapefruit edsel waffle iron ukelele.
Concerning how we deceive others, Tazanian albino hunting, and the world wide web as religion.
The WEB is my shepherd; I shall not doubt.
It maketh me to dive into vast communities: it leadeth me to confide my thoughts.
It restoreth my soul: it leadeth me in the paths of hypertext for the clean code.
Yea, though I surf through the torrents and flashes with spyware, I will fear no evil: your apps are with me; the scan and the quarantine comfort me.
Thou preparest a browser before me to learn of the faceless: thou anointest my mind with wiki; my apprehension becomes understanding;
Surely CPUs and broadband will follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell with the Web and the Network for ever.
- The Word of Baud
While some of you may be railing in sacriligious overtones of blasphemy and heresy, surely many of you must realize that the Web has become the one of the largest churches in the world. Hundreds of millions of us attend every day to read the good words of the preachers and prophets and skeptics and soothsayers all contributing to the word of Baud.
Baudhism's followers as of June 2008 total 1.46 billion people. While still behind the 1.9 billion Christians in the world, this easily overtakes all other major religions. I understand that most you are thinking that there is no way the Web could be considered a religion. I ask you to consider the following definition of religion from wikipedia.org:
"A religion is a of way of life based on tenets (or a belief system) about the ultimate power. It is generally expressed through conducts such as prayers, rituals, or other practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality (the cosmos, and human nature) which may yield a set of religious laws. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and religious experience."
The Web is a way of life for many people. It helps to define their existence. It facilitates communication. It sets the boundaries for what's considered sacred and profane within its own parameters. It provides, challenges, and allows for diverse beliefs all in one system. It accepts differences while galvanizing them all in two common frameworks: Web - the word, and Web2.0 - beyond the word. Such frameworks are subservient to the ultimate power: Network - which is, beyond the servers and the cable, the minds which make it up.
The beliefs are expressed through rituals and practices that gather up flocks by interest or history or geography. We script, we blog, we message, we update, we tweet, we read the good word of other people, we interpret and we believe. It seeks to explain the unexplainable. It seeks to define good and evil. It encourages creativity. It has zealots to be sure, but is fully accepting of those who just visit from time to time to make their contributions.
The Web defines us by defining our times and by seeking to redefine history. The winners may have written the history books, but the losers now have a voice of their own and a worldwide audience.
Lastly, people have faith in the web. That Wikipedia is taken as gospel and social networks have usurped traditional places of worship happened in no small part due to people believing in the general good of the Network.
It is said of religion that one only gets out of it what they're willing to put in. Such is the same with the Web. Our most passioned advocates are those acolytes who devote their lives to serving the Network to make the Web better. For them there is no greater reward than the work itself. I'm sure that less than a century ago, people would have considered it god-like for one person's thoughts to reach almost everyone in the world within seconds. And the Web makes this possible.
Baudhism does not disavow anyone for adhering to another belief system based on traditional mysticism. Baudhism embraces diversity, tolerance, individuality, creativity and participation. The Network shall allow access and allow inclusion, but not ensure popularity or status. As any religion, the Web can be used as a tool for such things, but these are not the ends of the Web in itself.
Embrace Baudhism. Identify yourself as a Baudhist on your next census. Celebrate holidays of any denomination because they allow people to stay home and spend more time with Web. Send greetings, send mail, chat, upload, download, interact. Become part of the trinity:
You belong to the Web.
The Web belongs to the Network.
The Network belongs to you.
