Robot Pirate Ninja

Chapter 3: Me and the God Path

          So there I was, writing a book that started with declaring to the world that I hear the voice of God in my head and wondering what I could do to try and convince you I wasn’t crazy.  So I went with the math.  How’d that work out?

          From my understanding of the process, people like me are created both by their inherent physiological nature (mostly understand in modern times as genetic inheritance, the “fan” in a moment) modified by events that shape their lives (mostly understand in modern times as the “shit” that happens to us).  I’m probably quite a bit like you in this respect, as that same generality could be applied to everyone.  In my particular case, one event that probably defined and shaped me more than another other, in particular my brain and aspects of my personality, was having my soul torn asunder as a young boy.  That was when the shit hit the fan, so to speak, in my universe.

          I grew up in a large, Mormon, seemingly perfect family.  My mother was a loving homemaker and my father a dedicated professional computer operator[1].  Formed by the core of a former Army officer and blushing young bride, our young family made stops in Georgia, and Arizona, where my older brother and sister were born respectively, before finally settling in Dallas, Texas.  There was also a stopover in Kansas that has nothing to do with this story.  In Dallas our family expanded to include myself and two more beautiful girls and became as complete as it ever was.  My father was an avid photographer and looking back at our young family I don’t think it would have been possible to imagine a more ideal existence.  I certainly couldn’t have, as it was all I had ever known.

          That all changed one Sunday morning as we gathered together as a family for what I thought was a family prayer.  This is a very common occurrence in all devout Mormon families, as we most certainly are.[2]  We were told that Dad was going to leave and that things were going to change.  I can still remember my youngest sister’s face, torn in a grimace of pain and agony that only a three-year old can muster.  She didn’t really understand the words, and I couldn’t tell you any of them either (my seventh birthday was a couple months away), but she certainly understood the mood.  She got what was going on, that something very bad was happening and things were going to change dramatically, and it still hurts today to think about it.

          Particularly when you pick at the wound as writing about such things tends to require. 

          There is a point to the personal bullshit that I’ll get to in a bit.  I really hate to be yanking your emotional chains to get sympathy votes.  Many children go through divorces, many of them much worse than mine.  Many children go through rampant sexual and physical abuse, so please, give your deepest sympathy to them.  The minds and bodies of the young are incredibly vulnerable to the abuses of their elders, and there is a deep and good reason to protect them from harm.  This includes sometimes lying to them, and putting a better face on a horrid situation.

          Lying by omission is what my parents did to me, and it did moderate the pain.  It did allow healing to begin, and scars to form.  I never saw them fight after that around us.  Even before the break-up I don’t recall many unpleasant words.  Perhaps that it why it came as such a surprise.  Boom!  Straight out of the blue.  Universe changed forever.

The Voice was silent, as it had yet to show up in my life.  The frog incident wouldn’t happen until about three years later.

Those threee years were a very dark time for me.  I hope you can see now why I have a draw to, and perhaps a flair for (?) the dramatic.   Many artists learn to see curious things in the Dark.

 My parents never cut each other down or were mean to one another.  Never around me, at least.  I can’t speak for the rest of reality[3].  It wasn’t until much later that I learned what the actual cause of the break-up to be.   Strangely, it was something I had known for a long time, but could never admit to myself.  It was something the Voice had told me long before it was confirmed by my younger sister. It was something I was even commanded to ask, and speak aloud, yet I had always denied that request, and said to myself “No, that can’t be possible.  Not in this world.  Not in this perfect world.  Not that.”  

          The clearest memory of my denial came around Christmas time of my 13^th or 14^th year.  We would alternate major holidays with each parental unit, effectively doubling the amount of presents we would receive and the corresponding attention they allegedly replaced.  My father was far more into this and my teenage mind got all the Transformers I needed to be properly stimulated.  I was infatuated with the idea of a robot that was conscious and could change form at will. It was during one of these toy-fests that I was urged to ask a fairly simple question of my father.

          I really wanted, needed, to ask, “Dad, are you gay?”

          The evidence to my adult mind is of course overwhelming.  The man he was seeing and staying with at the time was rather stereotypical flamer, lisp and everything.  He even had come on a “family” vacation with us to Seaworld.  There were some quickly aborted attempts to engage in fatherly discussion, as I would have none of it.  Even my eventual step-father, a good and steady man of few words, quickly realized that trying to play that role with me was a non-starter.[4]  Once bitten, thrice-shy, and I had been bitten hard and deep, pierced to the center of my heart.       

          Yet I never asked that fateful question.  I have a general feeling this is part of the reason I ask so many others.  Much of my life has been a search for answers to difficult questions.  I showed a certain promise at a young age both in reading and mathematics.  I could read a book or passage once and quote it at length and give a quick synopsis, and numbers sang to me, making so much sense that I was baffled when fellow students had to be told twice why 7*7 =49.  One look at the question and the answer sprung to mind, once I knew the rules.  So it is ironic, if you will, that so much of my journey came from an unresolved question that I never asked. 

          I said earlier that there was value in lying to children and shielding them from the truth.  In my case the hiding of truth, and indeed a true holding to the maxim of “let us never speak of it again” left a gaping hole in my heart without an explanation.  It was so deep that I didn’t even ask why.  It happened at an age where comprehension of an explanation would have been difficult.  I didn’t get it, and I didn’t know that I didn’t get it.  I just hurt, and I thought that was just the way things were.

          And so I retreated into my own mind.  Deep and far where no one could touch me.  In was in that dark, cold, and nasty place where the Voice came forth.  It was the depth of that sadness and pain that brought forth an antidote of biblical proportions.  I spoke earlier of the Chandresekhar limit for black holes and stars.  In my case, the black hole that formed was my heart, as my whole world and soul collapsed for reasons that were never fully explained to me.  I was left to figure everything out on my own.  The support structure was gone, and a powerful star, with lifetimes of intellectual fuel and curiosity upon which to build, suddenly went dark, eating itself and never letting anything out.  But I kept sucking everything in, filling up the same small space with more and more information.  This unconscious “sucking” or “learning” is a fundamental aspect of the human mind, as we’ll get to later. 

          We learn without thinking, and process information at levels that often our conscious mind is unaware. Particularly when our brains have yet to reach the level of physical maturity needed for coherent abstract thought, i.e. consciousness or self-awareness.

          I learned later of many ways in which the absolute darkness calls out to the absolute light.  The two are quite intimately related, as it turns out. Both limits on all that can be, with one standing in the middle.  The two metaphors that I wish to focus on are mathematical and sociological.

          Before we do that, let me tell you how the soulless operate.  In the soulless world there are only two things, everything and nothing.  There is nothing in between because there is no feeling.  There is is and there is isn’t.  I wonder what happens when I pick up this rock and throw it at his head?  Done solely to diagnose the answer to that question.   There is no malice in the throwing, necessarily, just a test to see what happens, to file for later usage.

          I wonder what happens if I punch him in the face?

          I wonder what happens if I tell a mean joke?

          I wonder what happens if I fake sick today?

          I wonder what happens if I throw the rock at his head?

          Does it work better when I smile?  How about when I cry?

          How do I get what I want?  Who can I take it from and get away with it?

          How can I make my path the easiest?

          “Yes”, and “no” were the only options.  Easier and harder the only rule.  Morality was not a question.  I was ruthless and good at it.

          Yes, boys and girls, and I think this with all of my heart and have the experiences (and I think a few people have the scars) to prove it, but if I hadn’t had the most amazing mother in the world, who loved me more than life itself, and gave me a beautiful light full of love to follow, young Roy would have become a steorotypical psychopath[5].  No shit.  I was well along that path already by the time I heard the Voice.

          There was a physical aspect to the violence that came with my emotional pain.  Not too much (I say…for a reason…), and not from my father.  There was plenty of pain to go around in such a situation, and shit flows downhill.

          I was in the middle of the hill, the third of five children.  The eldest was my brother, and when our family fell apart he became my father, in a sense.  And he beat, and teased, the shit out of me.

          Oh, not on my face, and not in places where it showed for long.  I was an active kid and got bruises and scrapes from any number of other places.  I did fall down a lot and I did manage to crack my own head open at least a half dozen times before I reached sentience.  I don’t think any of those literal head cracking moments came from my brother, but a lot of the others did. 

          In following his example I began to do the same to my younger sisters.  My mother put an immediate and absolute end to that experiment, and to question her was to question God himself.  She was the creator and provider. The lover and comforter.  The giver of peace and wisdom.  The absolute constant that for ten years had been the only consistent “good” in my life.  My speed of light.  Hi Mom!  I love you.

          My nickname as a young boy was “Booga.”   I was my mother’s “Booga Bear” having been born on Halloween.  I recall one incident where I had been involved in a tussle, and lost, and was sitting on the ground in a puddle wimpering.   My brother and some of the neighborhood kids had gathered around and began a chant, “Booga, Booga, Buggersnot, Sitting on His Doodoo Pot. [repeat until he runs away, crying fully now].”  

Kids are so alliterative. 

Those events replayed themselves more than once in my mind, although to be honest, much of that part of my childhood is gone or fuzzy, replaced only with feelings of shame and pain and worthlessness.  That event is one of my clearest memories of that dark teatime of my soul.

My aunt, whom we visited in Utah a year or so later during the summer as my mother continued to try and keep what was left of our family together, recalls very vividly how she, at first, called me “Booga.”  She still remembers to this day how I made it clear, and in no uncertain terms, that my name was “Roy” [my emphasis].    And now she knows why I had to make that clear.  “Roy the Boy Toy” was bit easier to deal with, and is rather funny when looked at in the context of this entire book.  A later nickname, “Roy, vey!” (with the emphasis on the “Oy, vey!” ), is somewhat more (or less) funny when looked at through the prism of Chapter 8.

          So I couldn’t do what I had learned and physically take out my pain.  Instead my pain and shame turned inward, and crushed my soul even further into the black hole I mentioned before.   When my body began to change, as my brother did a few years before me (hence the inherent fighting-class advantage, a welterweight (170 lbs) vs. a flyweight (125 lbs)), I vowed to work out every day until he couldn’t take me without losing occasionally.  I continued to hit the gym for the next ten years, from sixth grade to sixteenth, eventually roughly equaling my brother in weight, although he ended up 3 and half or four inches taller than me at 6’ 5” (I’m at about 210 in good shape, 240 out of it). My family produces some very large men, one of my first cousins played a number of years in the NFL as a (…sorry…) second-tier journeyman quarterback.   Another was a “stud” on Average Joe 2, a “reality” TV show about stereotypes and how to make money exploiting them (or at least that’s what I learned by watching it). 

          We all tend to shoot up at around the same age, and my brother had two-and-a-half-years head start.  It really wasn’t a fair fight for a looooong time (I’m pretty sure I stored that one in the ole noggin’ as an eternity of suffering[6]).  And everything went inward, collapsing on itself.

          Long story short, the soulless only see the world in two ways.  On or off.  Infinity or zero.

It takes a lens to see the light. It takes feeling to focus.

In a direct physical and mathematical metaphor, perfect chaos leads to perfect order, albeit in a messy, non-intuitive, non-linear, and ultimately un-provable way[7].  As you can probably guess, getting something that is either perfectly ordered or perfectly chaotic is more difficult that one might first assume.  One good example of a perfectly chaotic system is the many, many digits of π.  One can take any section of the billions and billions of digits of π that have been calculated (BTW, the billionth digit is 9, and there are, roughly, 99,999,999, other nines before it by the time you get to that billionth digit.  I did that in my head, BTW), and then take the average number of times any particular digit appears.  What was once a system where it was impossible to predict what would happen next, and seemed to be chaotic, we see a system where each digit is equally represented, the ultimate order and symmetry[8].

Sometimes it is actually a part of a culture to put boys of a certain age through psychological and physical tests of great severity.  It is usual, however, to prepare the young for such tribulations, and not surprise them with it.  They don’t like that.  The classic graphic novel by Frank Miller, 300, depicts a fictional telling of such a historical tradition[9]. I know many people don’t like reading comic books, and think they can offer no insight into the human condition, but it’s a cool story, with a bit of basis in fact.  The experience of being thrown to the wolves can make for some great leaders, warriors who can kill without a moment’s notice and stay calm in the storm, and it usually kills off the rest.  

There were no literal wolves, as Leonidas faced in his fatefulling tale, in my story.  I faced a much more cunning opponent.  The apathy and passive violence and mind-crushing soullessness of the “suburbs.” 

Quick anecdote, I played football for a long time (sixth to sixteenth grade) and it was a great outlet for some of my impulses.  It was a simple code to follow, when the whistle blows, act normal.  When the whistles blows again, and the play is dead, stop.  It worked pretty well for me.  I didn’t get worked up in games though.  At the end of my high school career, my position coach noted that he had never had the opportunity to coach “a Macintosh computer” before and looked positively puzzled as he said it.   I missed the vague puzzlement until rewinding the memory, as in real-time I had quipped “Windows.”  By then I was gaming on the home computer as Macs have sucked for gaming during my entire mature life.  

When I rewound the memory later and thought about it longer, I realized that was he was really saying is that he had no flippin’ idea what I was, and it kinda unnerved him.  This was a man I probably spent more time with than any other during those years, my “coach,” and he pretty much called me a robot[10].  

 When I played in college I was the middle linebacker and had to call the defenses and the huddle.  I found that wearing a mouthpiece wasn’t doing me any good, as it interfered with my ability to speak and because I played relaxed.  Really, relaxed, so much so that in all my years of playing without a mouthpiece I only clenched my jaw once enough to chip a small bit of tooth off.  I could finally play like I liked, with all the emotion and violence of a Dalek.  If you’ve ever played or watched American Football, realize, it is one of the most violent popular sports on the planet.   Watch a game or two and imagine something committing that level of violence as a natural, everyday kind of thing.

Football was one of the things that helped me keep it together as long as I did.  I love the game, love watching the game, love talking about the game.  I’d tell you how much I love my Dallas Cowboys, with that perfect star and that perfect royal stature, and that unmistakable Texas swagger, but then I’d probably piss off a lot of people in Washington, D.C. (with the most hateful name currently remaining in the league, Ha!), and San Francisco, and H-Town, and a bunch of other organizations I respect and admire (albeit a bit less than Jerry Jones’ plaything).  So I won’t pick a favorite, not really.  But I do love football.  For me, at that age, it was that perfect line, drawn in sport.  Plus they had that hole in the roof, so they were easy to keep an eye on.

I should also make it clear also that I was not a loner, or a “loser[11],” or even a shadow in my formative years.  I was usually one of the bigger, stronger, smarter kids in any given situation.  As such, and given the general tendency of our species to defer to larger, stronger, adversaries, I was actually somewhat popular in junior high and high school [12].

 I had learned a few lessons after the voice started talking to me and one of them was perhaps the simplest, greatest lesson I learned.

The schools in Richardson at the time of my education were divided into K-6, 7-9, and 10-12.  At each stage of commencement a number of smaller, feeder schools, would converge into the junior high schools and then ultimately all drain into one main high school.  During summers growing up I spent a great deal of time at the Greenwood Hills Community Swim Club.  It was pretty cheap daycare, and it kept me mostly out of trouble.  It was there that I honed my video games skills (I’m wicked good at Galaga and for a time could play all day on a single quarter…a good skill for one with access to very few quarters).

It was there also that I began to hone my peacemaking skills.  There was another young boy, of similar size and stature and intellect at a “rival” elementary school.  We were both the “alphas” if you will of our small packs of friends.  During that summer between sixth and seventh grade we crossed paths a number of times, and while we never quite came to blows, we really got close a few times.  I believe my favorite smack-talking metaphor from that period was something like, “Your ass in grass and I’m a lawnmower.”

I’m not sure who made the initial peace offering, but I know I jumped at it immediately.  Why fight with someone who is exactly like me, and can make me stronger as a friend and only weaker if I kept him my enemy?  And so our relationship changed and a bond was formed and he was my closest and dearest and best friend.   It was a good thing to be best friends with the other biggest, strongest, and best-looking guy in school.[13]

That friendship would come back into my story much later as he flew across the country and drove me home after my first aborted real attempt at writing this book.  I failed and was crushed, and was headed back toward the dark place I thought I had put behind me.  He came to save me.  A white knight if there ever was one, and I will man love him forever.

I’m not sure what would have happened if he hadn’t come, but at the time one of my top three options was to walk to Washington, D.C. from New York City, sit down in front of the White House, and set myself on fire.  I was rather distraught after the election in 2004 and felt the country’s decision to re-elect a man whom I felt was an ineffectual leader with a horrid governing political philosophy[14] would have serious and long-ranging consequences.  Consequences I really didn’t want to deal with, as I could see them coming and knew them to be dire.  I knew the Buddhists would do the fire show to illustrate graphically their absolute displeasure with their government and I thought it was a perfectly rational way to make a statement.

A final statement to be sure, but hopefully one that would be heard.  I read and posted news stories (I was writing full-time on my blog at that time, trying to convince as many as possible of the danger we were facing) about others who had committed similar acts, and felt it might be the right time for me to get off this rock.

This is the thinking that comes from a mind like mine.  A strong mind tempered through great trials and given a single path of purest truth to follow.  It’s tough to lose a battle with such a mind, especially when one is so sure of one’s own accuracy, and I lost it a bit.

One thing that did bring me back to earth, like the fabled Icarus, was the book “Into the Wild” by John Krakauer.  That story is about a boy similar to me who decides to take on “The Wild” (while I had decided to try and take on “The Order” or the “The New World Order of the Project for a New American Century”).  It was only reading that book, and realizing that my death would have made my mother sad, and hurt my family, that kept me from the brink long enough for my knight to come save me, flying on beasts of steel and flame[15]. 

I couldn’t be that selfish, as it wasn’t, ultimately, my life to give.  I can’t do much without my mother’s permission and had to ask twice before I could write this book (she said “Yes” both times, but I wanted to make sure).

If I may, I would like to return for a moment back to the “throwing to the wolves” bit I mentioned before.  While 300 is a fun example of the practice of ‘agoge,’ I first learned of a culture that did some similar from another source.  This was something of a final piece of the puzzle for me, as I realized that, yes, it was indeed possible that I was what I thought I was.  Which is to say, it helped me to finally say confidently, I am who I am.  And I am not the least bit embarrassed by the audacity of that statement.

The first credible source where I’d heard that people would pull shit like what happened to me on purpose, was Joseph Campbell, as he so eloquently put in on Disk 2, Chapter X of the DVD set of “The Power of Myth.”  I would highly recommend you watch this series, BTW.  Campbell was an absolute Oracle of cultural information and a master of comparative mythology and comparative religion.  It took one of his stature to place my mind at ease and tell me the story of my own creation.  I don’t have a lot of respect for authority, but I know an authoritative and loving tone when I hear one, and his voice was just that.  It is that second part, and his passion for the subjects of which he spoke that most touched me.

My great-great-great- or-so-grandmother was a Native America (Ute, most likely).  The lineage is more prominent in my mother, diluted a bit more with each passing generation.  This notion of being a “shaman” appealed to me.  I believe I posted that I felt like a “shaman” soon after[16].

The way the shaman worked, in one sense, is a bit like your local weatherman[17].  Take a few measurements, consult the stars, and predict when the storms would come.  This would be done with a show fitting such a predictor of the future.  What they don’t tell, and what the shaman would teach the next generation was probably a bit simpler.  Somewhere along the lines, someone of expanded intelligence/consciousness noted that certain cloud formations, during certain seasons, were reasonable predictors of certain types of weather.  Certain animals moving certain directions was another variable to factor.  So you get a song and dance, and the storm is predicted, the severity is predicted, and you wait to see what happens.  If the shaman is good at his job, the people are prepared and his status is confirmed.  This all leads to a steady supply of positive energy that can lead to new shamans, if you catch my drift.  If he’s not good at his job, the necessary elements don’t combine, and that bloodline falters.   I am a firm believer that there is a genetic component to spirituality, as there is to many other manias that humans struggle with.  My family is very strong in spirit.  And my family is very large.

Which is why it kinda hurt when they cast me into hell as an unbeliever.  They call it “Outer Darkness” and I have to let them know they are wrong.  You can still see the light there.  It’s actually much clearer than when you declare yourself to be the answer.  When you consider yourself to be the light of the world, you can no longer see all that much but your own light (reflected in the faces of the others).  This is the arrogance and downfall of Mormonism, which claims to be right and everyone else is wrong.  Southpark does a great job parodying Mormon heaven, which would be hell to any real thinker or artist.

          There are a great many others who have gone through similar struggles in their life and with varying results.[18]   Think of it as a bit like baking a cake, except where you are the cake.  As ingredients are added and prepared , a few moments too long here or two short there can change the outcome.  Too high a heat or too short a cooking time or tainted and/or spoiled ingredients can ruin a fine recipe such as yourself.  There is also the added bonus here, in metaphorical terms, of separating ingredient collection and measurement (genetic inheritance) and the act of combining them into a coherent whole (life experience) into two fully separate steps.  This will become more apparent in Chapter 7 as we discuss a modern and accurate concept of the mind and the soul.  It is also very easy to ruin a recipe when the heat and pressure necessary for creation are off the charts.

          And so it was that from the depths of darkness, and from what felt like the pits of hell, I could see a single point of light.  I knew immediately that it was the only thing that could save me, and lead me out of the hole I found myself in.  Unfortunately, it pointed straight up, which is one of the most difficult directions to go.  And the Light talked to me.

          Which I found a bit strange.

          My whole point in going into some of my formative experience is to tell you that people like me exist, and have throughout history[19].  There is nothing supernatural about it.  It is just extremely unlikely.  That’s it.