Virginia

We prefer the word 'kin' to the word 'cult." All the other cults are cults, except for the one you drink poison Kool Aid for. That's a joke we like to tell.

A bunch of us headed down to that Virginia campus where the big shooting happened so we could counsel any survivors that needed our help. They all do, really, but we can respect free choice. The thing about a free and pluralistic society is that there are people who have accepted the truth, and the people who can see it come aboard.

That's the simple part. We Kin have to help people to see the truth. All Kin know that they have to serve the Kahuna. That's the new word Kin Marshall McLune introduced to us to cover everything of a spiritual nature. This may be confusing. Think of the Kahuna as a tall sheet metal filing cabinet full of file folders containing all human spirituality. That wasn't so hard to digest. Kin Marshall gave us the word 'Kahuna' because it is a hip and happening sort of word.
So be it.

One of the funny things about enlightenment, of any kind at all, is that once it is apprehended it sits on a shelf with the toaster you got for opening a pass book account. It doesn't help you, unless you are making toast. To put it another way, you still have to use deodorant and argue with shrewish, promiscuous brother/sister Kin. I am every bit as committed to the cause as Kin Shannon, but she hates my guts and is a truly horrible person to drive with. We got to sign out the four ton Dodge Suburban (we call it the 'Burb') so it was a certainty that the trip would be fun, but we had to pour out 300 miles of ugly highway at 135 percent of the speed limit to get to the campus before the rest of new-found religious orders got a chance at it.



Kin Marshall realized that there is a limitless organizational device, best compared to a filing cabinet, that allows the cosmic counselors to track everyone's earthly thoughts and comings and goings. Of course this is merely a visual aid, the real process is a big hairy deal and it can only be understood when it is presented in outline/overview form. Too, the gospel can't be fully accepted until 501 c3 status is granted.

Our leader was seated in his high school guidance counselor's office one day of his junior year. His grades had been slipping, and there were some complaints about his hygiene, so he was sent to the guidance counselor. Mr. Stepchuck was a stern and overbearing social worker, with a frightening habit of pulling drawers of his filing cabinet out while brow beating young Marshall McLune. It would make a thunderous noise, and Marshall was bright enough to see that the filing cabinet served as a sort of slap stick. An authority figure would pronounce the complaints against Marshall, indicate that this was marked on his permanent record card, and pull the drawer much the way radio personalities would crank a siren to fill in the image of an emergency

The cabinet supposedly contained Marshall's permanent record card, which he was not allowed to see, and J. Edgar Hoover was. I told you that the Kahuna was an easy spiritual path to skip around on.

One of the things that brought Kin Shannon into the group was that she had some marks on her permanent record card.

So we argued most of the way to Virginia. It was everything that happened since she and I met a few months earlier. There was the incident in which I mixed up all the plastic beverage cups and forgot to turn the attached perma-straw to the West Wall of our temple. Then I put a whole cup of sugar in the grape Kool Aid, instead of the half cup that we were supposed to limit ourselves to. And I had no way of knowing that the office supplies needed to be chanted over before they can be put in their storage place. Marshall looked at me like I had tried stick a shiv in the Pope. But that was because Shannon ratted me out. Just like that. As if I had deliberately violated policies and procedures. That was her way of lowering me in the eyes of our leader.

Those were the conflicts that I could be impeached for. Then there are the typographical errors and falsifications that crop up in the papers of the soul. It was certainly not my fault that Shannon was in with the clique and I wasn't. She came aboard with a group of her friends from college. They eloped from their freshman year together.
They sneak drugs together, and they won't give me any. They even stopped our con-fabs to watch their collective favorite television show, reruns of "Friends." I hate that show. It never fails to remind me how unlikely spiritual growth most often is. It also reminds me that I don't belong to the clique.

I have gathered from membership in the Kahuna that as long as people share an objective, the petty differences in character among group members can be filed away for as long the goal is actively sought. Yet someone always manages to re-open the closed cases of interpersonal disharmony.

Kin Shannon was not lazy, nor was she a cynic. Her problems mostly had to do with poorly organized relationships. Too, there was a poorly organized little bag of behaviors that resulted in all those crappy kinships. That is why the Kahuna is such a keen way of leaping out of your folder of bad things, and into your next higher file drawer.

One of our policies is based on the Judeo-Christian type confession. It's mostly Christian, because Marshall used to be Catholic. We all have to fess up and make up. That's one thing everyone agrees on. Even those of us who aren't in the inner circle. I pulled the Burb over to the shoulder of I79, out of the way of prying head lights and confronted her about her patent and capricious anger. I was feeling imbued, and may have gotten to the documents in her folder.

Just the same, I have to call it a grudge match. Shannon is a drug dependant nympho, and I suspect her of being frigid but by the time she and I were both smoking a Cool, I think we had both neatened up our eternal documentation.