RITUALS

I like a certain amount of ritual. Ritual is comforting. It unites people in purpose, allows them to celebrate their commonality even in the midst of diversity, and all but eliminates the sometimes nasty surprises that punctuate the rest of our lives.

I remember pointing this out to a young woman at a party when I was in college many years ago. She had just handed me a joint, which was traveling around the room from person to person. I saw it coming. I knew what to do with it. It dawned on me in the midst of it—it was not my first toke at this particular party—that the familiarity of the process was as comforting as the drug itself.

“Don't you think it's interesting,” I asked, “how ceremonial this is?”

“Ceremonial? You mean smoking dope?”

“Yes. It's practically sacramental. Everyone does it the same way. There are conventions. Differences are just variations on a theme. Deviation is frowned upon.”

“Huh?”

At this point I realized that, not only was the young woman already beyond understanding my insight, the fellow next to me was studiously frowning upon my deviation from accepted practice. I was waving the joint around in the air while I tried to explain myself when I should already have passed it along to him.

He may also have been thinking that I was trying to leverage high-toned philosophy into a romantic dalliance with the young woman in question. Possibly it was lost on him that my philosophy was lost on her. In any event, I passed the reefer along and quit talking for the duration of the party. No dalliance happened.

Some years later, when I had given up marijuana as the idle pursuit of the young and stupid, the senior partner of the CPA firm I was working for invited me to his church for Easter services. His church was a brand new structure of glass and steel nestled into several thousand acres of reclaimed Florida orange grove. It was huge and imposing and had attracted a large flock of faithful contributors.

By this time I was already a devout practicing Catholic, and so I was reluctant to spend any time in a Protestant church where I was sure to hear something that would offend my papist inclinations. The senior partner was trying to be persuasive.

“It's really going to be impressive,” he said. “There will be a complete orchestra, and a guy is going to come up out of the floor of the sanctuary on a white horse—just like the second coming in Revelations.”

“Sounds spectacular,” I said. “but it also sounds a lot like pageantry. I actually prefer something a little more liturgical.”

The senior partner never treated me quite the same way after that exchange. In retrospect, I probably should have tried to sound a little less superior, a little less judgmental. I had managed to denigrate the man's religious sensibilities, which were at least sincere if somewhat misguided.

My preference was for the familiarity of ritual—in this case a remembrance of and celebration of Christ's Resurrection from the tomb and the cementing of the Paschal sacrifice. The partner's preference was for a spectacle that embraced the Apocalypse as well as the Resurrection. Nothing says triumph quite like a guy on a white horse.

On the other hand, nothing turns religion into a circus quite like bringing animals into church. I think it's just asking for a surprise calculated to test your faith beyond its endurance. A horse in church is just one step removed from poisonous serpents, and vipers in church are just one step past full-on crazy.

I bring all this up because I have been thinking about rituals (again) lately—since my wife pointed out that I have made a ritual of preparing my morning latte and my evening martini. She said that I seem to enjoy the process as much as the resulting beverages. She is exactly right. Each one has assumed the Zen aspect of a Japanese Tea Ceremony for me. There are precise steps in a precise order, and if I'm somehow forced to diverge from the established way of things I get flummoxed.

first time out with my new
espresso machine. aficionados
will note that I didn't know
what I was doing yet.

A proper latte requires, in my world at least, nine vessels and about 15 minutes. I have to drink it in less time than it takes to make it or it will get cold. I have a manual espresso press, so I have to use separate mechanisms to heat the water and the milk. I need to heat fresh, filtered water in a tea kettle. The milk and a little stevia to sweeten goes into a Pyrex measuring cup, which is microwaved for 80 seconds. The milk is then foamed with a foam pump. When the water boils, I pour some into both the espresso press and the cup I will drink from to warm them up. My big cup won't fit under the filter basket, so I need to use a separate small ceramic pitcher for the final pull. I warm this up too. With everything properly warmed, it's time to pack the coffee into the filter basket. I buy whole beans, and grind them myself—40 seconds in the grinder does the trick. I then pack the ground coffee into the filter basket, reattach the basket to the press, add hot water (now properly just off the boil), and pull a double shot into the ceramic pitcher. Now I pour the coffee into my warm cup, and add the hot foamy milk. Final step is to stir it all together and enjoy.

I fully understand that for most people this is one hell of a lot of work to go to to get one simple cup of coffee. My response is: 1) it's not a simple cup of coffee, and 2) if you don't enjoy the process you're missing the point.

A proper martini at my house only requires six vessels, and the process goes a lot faster than the construction of a latte, but it is somehow more ethereal and satisfying in the end. I don't think this is solely because 'spirits' are involved.

I've written elsewhere on my blog about how I make a martini. You can read more about it HERE if you're interested. What's important to know is this: I swear to you that I can stand next to another person making martinis, and even though we both use exactly the same ingredients in exactly the same proportions, added in exactly the same order, our martinis will taste different. I like to think that mine will be better, but that is probably just a matter of personal preference.

I think that there is a fourth ingredient to a proper martini, beyond gin, vermouth, and garnish, that is not measurable nor discernible. That ingredient is where the ethereal comes into play. I don't even know what it is. It may be love. It may be purity of heart. It may be reverence for the ritual. I don't know, but I do know that whatever it is, it makes a difference, and that difference shapes a lot of my life.

I'm not about to abandon the rituals I've embraced, and at my age I'm probably not going to embrace any new ones either. This doesn't mean I won't change. I certainly will. Change for me has its own attendant rituals, which, practiced with sufficient reverence, render it more charming than surprising, more celebratory than fearsome. I'm happy to change, but I still don't like nasty surprises. Whatever changes I make, you can be certain that I won't be riding a white horse or bringing any vipers to church.

Blowing Up Your School for Extra Credit

Tough homework assignment.

Everyone who's going to school gets first day of school jitters. Students, teachers, administrators, custodial staff, cafeteria help, resource officers. This day and age probably especially resource officers because, let's face it, kids are getting more and more dangerous every year.

In my neighborhood we're just getting over the tragedy of a seventeen year old kid caving in his parents' skulls with a claw hammer and then throwing a big party for all his slacker friends. Nobody knows why he would do such a thing, but he did. It looks like he's thinking about claiming to have been possessed by the Devil. At least he'd been hinting around to some of his friends for several weeks that he thought he might be possessed. Apparently Satan wanted him to get a leg up on his defense by laying the groundwork early.

Now a couple of weeks ago in Tampa another kid got arrested for planning to set off a series of bombs at Freedom High School. He got expelled last year after he was arrested and convicted on a burglary charge. The ink is barely dry on his driver's license, and already he's been caught with a stolen handgun, drug paraphernalia, marijuana, and more. Seems like he wanted to go out in a Columbine style blaze of glory. I don't know how simple-minded kids like this come up with this shit, but they do. It's scary.

About the only comfort we can take in all this is that, no matter how grandiose their evil schemes turn out to be, their execution leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully seventeen-year-old boys are just as stupid today as they've always been, even though they can learn to do virtually anything on the Internet.

The kid in Tampa couldn't help but tell his friends about his big plans. This proved to be his undoing. Whatever he read to make him think blowing up his school was a good idea failed to mention that he ought to keep his plans a secret. Seems like he probably told someone who didn't want any of his friends to get killed making the mad bomber famous. They called the cops.

So the cops rushed over to the kid's apartment to find him stoned out of his gourd and playing video games with another stoner. His room was full of bomb-making materials. He had fuel, accellerant, fuses, timers, shrapnel, the works. He also had marijuana plants under cultivation, and a manifesto of sorts detailing his minute-by-minute plans for visiting carnage on his former school on opening day.

His stoner buddy said he was just venting, that he never would have actually done it. I don't know about you, but I think, when somebody starts laying in supplies, things have progressed beyond mere venting.

Now there's plenty for me to not understand about this whole situation, but right at the heart of it is this: I can't for the life of me figure out what the dumb sumbitch was pissed off about. He posted on his FaceBook page that all he wanted to do was get stoned every day. I figure everybody's entitled to pursue happiness in their own way. If something was getting in the way of this kid's happiness, I could understand him being a little peevish, but there were no apparent impediments to this kid realizing his dream.

He was already getting stoned every day. He didn't have to go back to school because he was expelled. He was living his dream, such as it was. He was a fully-realized, totally uncommitted pot-head without a shred of responsibility. Where was the pressure? What was the problem?

Then suddenly he comes up with this plan. He decides on his own that he's going to go back to school for one day. He put the pressure on himself, not exactly stereotypical behavior for a pot-head. He didn't want to screw it up so he wrote a minute-by-minute plan in voluminous detail. If you told him he had to write a 300 word composition for English class, he'd have been rendered inert by the Herculean task being thrust upon him. He wouldn't have been able to function as a normal zit-faced, hormone-infused teenager with all that homework in the pipeline.

But a 14-page plan of action with clearly delineated goals and interim gateways—totally different matter. One wonders how he was able to maintain his focus through the haze of cannabis smoke, but he did. Somebody ought to grade the paper, see how much he'd learned before he got expelled. Standards aren't real high in the Florida school system. Our new governor, Rick Scott, is trying to erode them further still in an effort to put the state on a more businesslike footing. He's cutting down on the number of resource officers in the schools too. I guess he feel like if we lose a bunch of students to random and spectacular acts of violence, we won't have to pay to educate them anymore. Even better if we can scare a bunch of parents into putting their kids in private schools. Less burden for the state and more money to go around for the corporate sponsors of business-friendly legislation. You know—win, win. Governor Scott ought to think about giving this kid a medal for creative budget cutting.