Ho hum. Here I sit on a Sunday night, ignoring grading and paper writing. I had a knock around day. I slept in until almost 11:30. The dog was frantic to go outside and used all his doggy powers to get me up. I might have slept until one otherwise. Jes and I are helping out a friend who is on the lam from her life, so I went by her place and fed her cat. The cat needed loving, so I lounged around and watched The Italian Job until Jes showed up. Jes often spends her Sunday mornings blowing glass down at the studio and is now working extra to get ready for holiday sales.

After the movie we took her motorcycle downtown to Jay”s International Supermarket; I hadn’t been there in a few years. We did some other shopping and then she motored off to a gingerbread house party with some theologically inclined friends, leaving me to get caught up on work. I wasn’t in the mood for born again breading (that’s bad isn’t it). I proceeded to spend the next several hours cleaning my fish tanks, listening to This American Life on NPR and watching elephants predict earthquakes on PBS. I guess I am getting caught up on downtime.

I did walk up the street to check out a friend of mine’s new business and she gave me the grand tour. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, if you’ve dug around in the archives, or if you just know me then you’ll know that I spent three years, as I like to call it, living in the land of the new age. I could write a book about it. Maybe someday I will. I did Kundalini yoga, argued with Buddhist nuns when they tried to repossess our sacred PVC pipe pyramid with the Christ Consciousness dodecahedron on top, and I followed Tibetan monks in baseball caps around, head bowed, while they threw minute rice into the corners of the business for a blessing. I have many other tales of woe from the fringes of semi sane salary men.

The link to today is that just as spider plants throw off shoots, new age or holistic businesses tend to get into quasi theological arguments and send runners off from the main plant to grow in slightly different soil. Some of them take and some of them crash and burn. I was actually hired back in 2001 to replace a group of people who had stormed off to start their own business. Theirs failed and ours almost did too. It would have if it weren’t for Ann and myself; two people with no business training turned a business that was 100,000 in debt into a business that was highly profitable in under two years. It’s odd that what I can do for other people, I can’t do for myself.

The owner of that business can’t tell his ass from his elbow and was two steps away from the clink when we came on board. He thinks that his karma saved him. Maybe it was his karma to hire us. Dumb luck may also have factored in. It was a fun ride for a time, but I was selling myself short being there. When he started to use high pressure sales techniques I lost what respect I had for the business. My former employer’s life goal is now to be the next Wayne Dwyer. Look for his self published book at swap meets near you. I hear he has a few thousand copies under the staircase. His fortune will be well spent on the always lucrative narcissism industry.

Some time after I left my administrative post, there was something of a melt down. Near as I have been able to determine, my former employers wanted the faculty to sign a sort of non competition contract that would legally bar them from taking any secret school techniques off premise. I have buckets of the stuff if anyone is interested in it and have never signed anything regarding its proper disposal, which is all it is really good for.

I think the main document of concern was an instructional binder that is filled with all sorts of syncretism. On the surface this binder seems like an ordinary instruction manual in massage technique, but if you ever have to edit it for grammar and spelling mistakes, as I did, you will find all sorts of conflicting references to Jesus Christ, archangels, and other new age foot holds. It is truly a bizarre bit assemblage – a buffet approach to both massage and spirituality. A key irony in the desire to keep the binder proprietary is that it is itself a stunning piece of sampling in violation of about a hundred instances of copyright law for which not a dime of royalties have ever been paid to anyone. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh. If anyone ever calls them on it they will be offered some kind of a deal, that is the way these things work. It simply doesn’t make sense to shut a business down when you can claim a piece of future earnings. I have seen that principle in action many times.

On the intellectual front, there is great episode of the West Wing where Donna’s character is sent to investigate a new age speaker who is potentially influencing a political opponent’s campaign. In two shakes of a stick our intellectual hero identifies the self help pap as watered down Immanuel Kant. That was my life for three years: helping the philosophically challenged find their way to the delusion of the month. There were good things about it. It was a job, like anything. I got about four free hour long massages a week. Anyway, back to the narrative of division.

When faced with rather insulting prospect of signing away the right to do something that they had no intention of doing, several faculty members decided to do exactly what the contract was designed to prevent, thus blowing up in the faces of the people who proposed the contract and creating the very situation that they had hoped to legally prevent. We haven’t come far from the playground have we? Everyone took their toys and went home.

So, L has opened a new school just up the block from me and now, as ever, she has no idea what to make of me. She gave me a royal welcome. I could give her a very profitable side business in new age retail, which I know backwards and forwards, which she knows, so it’ll be interesting if she makes me an offer. I had the impression that she might. But I am done with that. Maybe for a massage or two I could give her some advice, but my advice to myself is keep on keeping on in the direction I am headed.