Gatekeepers are superfluous and hateful. They practice simony and barratry without shame or hinderance.
I’ve always thought so, ever since Kindergarten -- when my teacher dictated who got to play in the sandbox and when; and who got to use the colored clay sticks and when; and told us when to lay down for a nap and then, just as I was starting to get sleepy, telling us to get up.
What kind of life is that for a child? Being denied time in the sandbox because it was time for finger painting, and other folderol.
I have spent a lifetime cocking a snook at gatekeepers and trying to escape their baleful influence.
I hated my father for being the gatekeeper of my allowance. In the early morning I would get up and hide his dentures so he would be late for work. Down with oppressive gatekeepers!
In high school when I told my counselor I wanted to be a circus clown he told me I couldn’t do it. It was impractical. There was no future in it.
He tried slamming the gate on my dreams, but I fooled him good. I got into the Ringling Clown College and then got a contract with the Greatest Show on Earth, and went on to perform as a clown for nearly the rest of my working career. It kept me broke, ruined my marriage, and estranged me from my children for 20 years, but by the Great Horn Spoon I did it in part just to spite that high school gatekeeper! Nyaaaaaaaah!
“Stop!” “Who goes there?” “What’s the password?”
That’s all I’ve heard all my life. When I worked at Circus World in Haines City, Florida, the boss clown fired me for changing my makeup without permission, leaving me with a sick pregnant wife to care for and no income. Who the hell made him the gatekeeper of my clown makeup? Nobody. The finicking bloated martinent!
When I wore a bowtie instead of a necktie to work at radio station KSAL in Salina, Kansas, I was fired for insubordination. What in the wide wide world possessed those apple-knockers to think they could deny me employment because of what I wore around my collar? Such abuse of power was, and is, as shocking as it is moronic. Those gatekeepers should be made to sleep on a bed of sandpaper in the nude. Grit size P12.
The Utah courts would not listen to my appeals against my wife’s petition for divorce -- they called it “No Fault Divorce”. The gibbering villains. The supine homebreakers. The monstrous gatekeepers, battening on the law for their indifferent subsistence!
Who says I can’t put mustard on my scrambled eggs? Protests when I use a paper plate as a Frisbee. Frowns when I leave dirty dishes in the sink until lichen grows on them. Tells me eating at McDonalds is a civic and moral sin.
I’ll tell you who says all those despicable things. Dirty lousy gatekeepers. Officicious, prying gatekeepers. Malign and self-serving gatekeepers, without a shred of any real jurisdiction, and nobody else!
When I wanted to dress up like Hitler so I could parade past Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and give him a Sieg Heil during a Ringling matinee, who stopped me? Charlie Baumann -- that tumefied Teuton gatekeeper!
At my first radio job in Williston, North Dakota, I wanted to announce the self-inflicted death of a prominent Catholic businessman. The station manager, Bill Anderson, wouldn’t let me do it -- because he was nothing but a ferret-faced, toadying gatekeeper for the business community. The other radio station in town and the town newspaper gave full coverage of the suicide. Pfaa! It makes me ill to write of it.
My own sister took me to court to rob me of my inheritance from my mother, leaving me homeless and unable to pay my child support. Why? Because she wanted to play gatekeeper of my money and self respect -- she thought I had too much of both. Once decided on such a foul career, no gatekeeper can keep their heart beating with anything but malice. If they can keep their heart beating at all.
I worked for the Utah State Tax Commission as a telephone tax collector. When I applied for an opening as supervisor of telephone collectors an insufferable gatekeeper named Dorothy from HR told me I was disqualified because I neglected to include a small detail on my application about previous employment -- a job that had lasted barely 3 months. She denied me the chance to progress in government employment and so provide my family with a stable and adequate income -- the bilious old crow of a gatekeeper!
I curse her, and all gatekeepers who function without authority, compassion, wit, or humanity.
I curse the gatekeepers at the Minnesota Department of Recovery Services for revoking my driver’s license for back child support when I was making regular payments, all I could afford, and taking care of my dying mother. Because I no longer could drive I could not take her out on the brief excursions she so much enjoyed, and so her last months on earth were made much more miserable by soulless and rancid gatekeepers to uphold an unjust and unhallowed piece of legislation. May their ears fill with coarse hair and their lungs fill with kapok.
The gatekeepers at airports. At Costco. At Walmart. At nameless roadblocks and speed traps. At gas stations that want payment before pumping. In MBA programs and at walnut burl desks in Washington. Cops that profile skin color and imagined nationality. They all proliferate like maggots on dung.
My own body is full of gatekeepers. My narrow arteries that won’t let the blood circulate freely. The enlarged prostate that restricts my urine flow. A digestive system that takes too long to process my meals, giving me sour breath and constipation.
When will God strike down the gatekeepers and give us surcease from their senseless, useless, and cruel blockades?
And there are gatekeepers who keep out the real gatekeepers. Yes there are. Such usurpers thrive amidst the noisome din of existential and atheistic clap-trap.
I loathe the unfrocked and unchurched gatekeepers who block the path to repentance and forgiveness.
In Thailand I was often drunk, and lived with a Thai woman who was not my wife. And there were so many pseudo gatekeepers who told me “It’s alright, you may pass; you have nothing to worry about and may continue on with your life as you please.”
Thank heavens I recognized them as the mountebanks and chiselers they are, and finally sought out the true gatekeepers -- for have I said such do not exist? -- to seek their kindly help in finding the correct and proper way into inner grace and harmony.
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