Michael Kindt's Blog, page 139
March 25, 2015
March 24, 2015
I wanted to become a Freemason so I could become a Shriner so I could wear a fez and drive one of those little cars.
Also, to give back. The Shriners paid for all of my medical care when I was born with my heart in backwards. To become a Freemason, one simply needs a penis and a belief in a Supreme Being, which I got, but apparently you have to also be invited and no one ever invited me so I never became a…
I bought an old Freemason Bible at the library across the street from my house. It cost all of $1. Now I hold secret rites in my house on the third Monday of every odd numbered month and every second Tuesday of the even months.
Seriously? How come you don’t live here? Haha. Be my friend! God knows I would love to meet a man about my age whose interests include something other than sports or vehicles or pop culture.
My Odd Fellows rituals book only cost me ten bucks and I thought it was well worth it. I’ve since perused more of it and it’s quite neat. The rituals are truly lessons, of a cosmic/philosophical nature. I see the point of them.
Maybe I will start my own secret society: the Conclave of Distinguished Gentlemen. We will be “Codgers” for short. We will perform rituals in our darkened lodge and at other times socialize, drinking without the distractions of televisions or music. Actually talking to one another. Using phones or computers would be banned in the clubhouse, as would cigarette smoking (which is womanly), but not cigar or pipe smoking. Members would be required to have facial of some sort :)
Haha, sounds fun!
Electronic stores pinching out electronic shit to keep us tracked, distracted, and disconnected. Pharmacies in cahoots with doctors dealing drugs for corporate cartels.
Strip malls, liquor stores, coffee shops, sports bars, rent-to-own centers, payday loan sharks. Isn’t it hilarious how dystopian literature is always set in the future?
Across the Nash Street bridge and down another mile, you get out of the rottenness a little bit and into a working-class area. Directly behind the Garden of Eatin’ supermarket was E-Z Storage and my next appointment. I pulled in and sat there on the asphalt. I was supposed to look for a white SUV this time, but my mind wandered to food. I imagined my belly button sucking up against my spine. Donuts, egg rolls, hamburgers, pizzas, potato chips, omelets, big blocks of cheese paraded through my mind pornographically. I was going to have to eat, and soon. There was a romance in delaying, though, I was finding.
Someone pulled in behind me and I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that it was the white SUV. A middle-aged woman got out holding a large set of beautiful shiny keys.
"Are you the gentleman who wants to see the units?"
"I want to see the units, yes."
She began walking toward the buildings, manipulating the beautiful shiny keys. “We have two available,” she said, “a full-size garage and a smaller one. Which one were you interested in?”
"The smaller one, probably. I don’t want a garage door"
She walked quickly, like she was in a hurry, and instead of keeping up, I lagged behind on purpose. The faster she clicked and clacked across the asphalt in her heels, the slower I sauntered along behind.
She got about fifteen yards ahead of me, then paused and waited. “The smaller unit is just in this building here,” she said as I wandered up. “We’ll look at that one first.”
"An idea both reasonable and efficient," I said.
"Excuse me?" she said and began walking again.
Like Self Storage, these were long rectangular buildings, but unlike Self Storage, which were concrete, these were metal, yellow-brown metal, and certain to be deafening in a rainstorm.
We went down a narrow walkway made by the back of the Garden of Eatin’ and the side of the storage units, turned, and walked up one unit. “This is the smaller one,” she said. She removed the padlock and stepped back.
I went in and said, “This will work.”
Not a bad day out here.
Not a bad day out here.
March 23, 2015
I wanted to become a Freemason so I could become a Shriner so I could wear a fez and drive one of those little cars.
Also, to give back. The Shriners paid for all of my medical care when I was born with my heart in backwards. To become a Freemason, one simply needs a penis and a belief in a Supreme Being, which I got, but apparently you have to also be invited and no one ever invited me so I never became a Freemason or a Shriner or got to wear a fez or drive one of those little cars.
At the rare bookstore today, I found a ritual monitor for the Odd Fellows, published in 1909. The Odd Fellows are another secret society, one with a cooler name, I think. It’s a big, faded, ancient, beautifully musty smelling old book. As an object, it’s just neat as shit. I love old books, no matter what they say in them. Physical books will one day be gone, banned probably to protect trees or because of climate change or whatever lie they’ll come up with. It will be some variation of “for our own good”, though.
I have read the Initiation ritual and it’s quite creepy. The candidate is brought into the darkened (candlelit) lodge by a “conductor”. All of the other Odd Fellows are sitting there in the dark. Everybody (except the candidate) recites an ode:
"Brethren of our friendly Order,
honor here asserts her sway;
All within our sacred border
Must her high commands obey.
Join, Odd Fellowship of brothers,
In the song of truth and love;
Leave disputes and strife to others,
We in harmony must move.
Honor to her courts invites us,
Worthy subjects let us prove;
Strong the chain that here unites us,
Linked with Friendship, Truth and Love.
In our hearts enshrined and cherished,
May these feelings ever bloom;
Failing not when life has perished,
Living still beyond the tomb.”
After this, the candidate’s upper torso is bound with a chain and he is blindfolded. The conductor holds one end of the chain, sort of like a leash, and leads him around the lodge, reciting: “Man in darkness and in chains! How mournful the spectacle! Yet ‘tis but the condition of millions of our race, who are void of wisdom, though they know it not. We have a lesson to impart to him; one of great moment and deep solemnity; a faithful exhibition of the vanity of worldly things; of the instability of wealth and power. Of the certain decay of all earthly greatness. Be serious, for our lesson is as melancholy as it is truthful.”
After this, the conductor stops leading the candidate around the lodge, removes the blindfold and says: “Behold death, that silent yet impressive lecturer! To vice confusion, but to virtue peace, it is all which remains on earth of one who was born as you were born, who lived as you now live, and who for many days enjoyed his possessions, his power and his pleasures. But now, alas! nothing is left of him save this sad memorial of man’s mortality. The warm heart which throbbed for other’s woes, or the cold one which held no sympathy, has now mouldered away and joined its kindred dust.”
Sitting before the candidate, who can now see, on a throne-like chair is a real human skeleton.
There’s more, but that’s the gist of it, and all I gotta say is sign me the fuck up!
On Sunday Starbucks ended it’s bizarre, tone deaf, and...
On Sunday Starbucks ended it’s bizarre, tone deaf, and certainly boneheaded “Race Together” campaign after widespread ridicule. Starbucks insists that the campaign, which didn’t even last a whole week, was not ended because of the ridicule. This, of course, is a lie.
The corporate overlords at Starbucks thought it would be a good idea to make its customers uncomfortable by starting up a conversation with them about race while they got their morning joe. Along with writing the hashtag activism-like “Race Together” on coffee cups, strange, Mad-Libs-style “conversation starters” were going to be posted at all Starbucks registers as inspiration to baristas and customers. Here those actual conversation starters are, ranked by me according to awkwardness and how long they’ll hold up the line:
1) In my Facebook stream, ___% are of a different race.
1) In the past year, I have been to the home of someone of a different race ___ times.
1) In the past year, someone of a different race has been in my home ___ times.
1) ___ members of a different race live on my block or apartment building.
1) In the past year, I have eaten a meal with someone of a different race ___ times.
1) I most often talk to someone of another race:
___ At work
___ Church
___ Home
___ Shopping
___ School
1) At work, we have managers of ___ different races.
1) My children have ___ friends of a different race.
1) My parents had ___ friends of a different race.
1) I have ___ friends of a different race.
Imagine waiting to pay too much for your caramel macchiato while the barista and person ahead of you engage in a pissing contest about who has the most “different races” on their Facebook stream. I wonder, would the person with the most “different races” get a discount?
Starbucks hasn’t made any plans for the future as of yet, but you can bet your sweet ass it includes moralizing, pandering, and taking out full page ads in USA Today.
March 22, 2015
"I am more considerate to the vain than to the proud.
Is wounded vanity not the mother of all tragedies? But where pride is wounded there surely grows up something better than pride. If life is to be pleasant to watch, its play must be well-acted: for that, however, good actors are needed. I found all vain people to be good actors: they act and desire that others shall want to watch them—all their spirit is in this desire. They act themselves, they invent themselves; I like to watch life in their vicinity—it cures melancholy. I am considerate to the vain because they are physicians to my melancholy and hold me fast to mankind as to a play. And further: who can estimate the full depth of the vain man’s modesty? I love and pity him on account of his modesty. He wants to learn belief in himself from you; he feeds upon your glances, he eats praise out of your hands. He believes even your lies when you lie favorably to him: for his heart sighs in its depths: ‘What am I?’ And if the virtue that is unconscious of itself be the true virtue: well, the vain man is unconscious of his modesty!”
—Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Joke Time: A gorilla walks into a bar
and asks the bartender for a drink. The bartender finds this very peculiar and realizes he is having a dream. He wakes up and tells his wife about the strange dream he just had, but she ignores him. He rolls over on his side and starts to sob because he knows his marriage is in shambles.
March 21, 2015
Talked to a 92 year old WWII vet at the T.R.E.A. bar tonight. It was quite something.
He was spry and sharp as a tack, but pretty careful moving. He was chaparoned by his granddaughter, who, get this, was in her mid-50s.
Crazy.
We talked March Madness basketball—he believes Kentucky will be upset—and the millions of things he’s done, like served in the Army Air Corps, later to be known as the Air Force, for some 20-odd years, then went into law enforcement, eventually becoming sherriff of an Idaho county. He then worked as one of the first helicopter pilots covering traffic in LA, a job he described as “goddamn boring”. Later, he flew a medical helicopter, hauling critical cases from all over the mountain west to Denver or Salt Lake City, as the case may be. Then he did did something he always wanted to do: start his own business, and bought a motel near Yellowstone.
All this time he was happily married to one woman (his wife passed in the mid-90s) and produced 3 children, 2 sons and a daughter, all of whom he is proud of and all of whom are now retired. One son became an engineer, the other son went into finance. His daughter got her PhD and became a professor of biology at a college in Minnesota.
He served in the Pacific and told me “on some goddamn island or other” he witnessed a Japanese soldier commit hari kari. Did you know that after the they slash their belly, they reach in and yank out their own intestines?
Yeah, me neither.
I offered to buy him a drink, but he quit 9 years earlier after he fell down drunk one night and broke his hip.
Helluva man. Helluva night.
Cheers.
