I used to be superstitious about a lot of "old wives tales." You know, black cats, umbrellas indoors, Friday the 13th and so on. I think right around the time I decided that organized religion was just a way for the powers that be to control the rest of us I decided that if God was simply a fabrication, so must other "beliefs." A similar smashing of a previously accepted personal world order occurred for me when I asked my mother point blank if there was a Santa Claus.
She answered my question flatly, without any hesitation.
"No."
My jaw dropped and instantly, I realized that if Claus didn't exist, neither did the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy or any other benevolent being who never showed his face directly to me. Of course, I didn't connect this to the Big G, until I was about ten or eleven years of age sitting in Sunday School. I remember hearing the Hitler-youth-esque teacher insisting that God was all around us, inside of us and inside of everything else.
I looked to the center of the table I was sitting at with two or three other kids and asked aloud: "So, God is right there?"
A girl at my table looked where I was pointing and said as enthusiastically as the SS (Sunday School) teacher had, "Yes! Of course!"
My kid-brain had a problem with that. I smirked and said: "WHY?"
That was when I became an Atheist. Sure, I bandied about the idea that I might be an Agnostic, but that would suggest that I believed their was a God and that I just didn't know Him. After all, the word "agnostic" means "without knowledge" (A=latin for without and Gnostic=latin root for knowledge). Atheism is the one label that fits me best because I am quite sure that there is no god in any sense that has yet been defined. There may be a creator of the universe or a grand spirit or even a plan for this giant cosmos we all exist in, but is his name "God," "Yahweh," "Allah," or "Jesus?" Definitely not (especially the last one!).
I'm not sure when this godless universe view spread to superstition, but it happened during my adult years. It was probably when I was researching the Templar Knights and learned that the Templars were outlawed by the Pope back in the late 1200s/early 1300s--on October 13th--it was a Friday. (I forget the exact year.) The Templars, although not well known these days, were quite literally the Jedi Knights of the dark ages. They were known throught Europe (the entire western world, at the time) as just, but unfuck-withable knights who were both diplomats and warriors. They fought the British alongside William Wallace (Braveheart) and loaned money to kings for wars. Think of them as the Federal Reserve of the time period (which is a more ironic comparison than you know).
The point is, the fear of Friday the 13th probably comes from the banning of these guys on that day. Imagine if all of the sudden Democrats were outlawed by Bush. Imagine then that every Democrat was hunted down and killed--this is what happened to the Templars (well, some escaped). How shocking would that be for modern society? No doubt the day the decree from Bush came down would go down in history as that bad day. Like 911.
So, following that logic, black cats, umbrellas indoors and passing under ladders all became things I was no longer afraid of. However, I still eye each Friday the 13th with a bit of trepidation. When I was a teenager, I visited the now closed theme park Action Park in New Jersey and seriously messed up my left knee--I sport a scar on it to this day. Of course, Friday the 13th had nothing to do with the accident--Action Park was a well-known death trap. On another trip there, my ex-step-brother rode a waterslide and got turned upside-down. When he came out, he slammed his head on the bottom of the pool and had to have brain surgery--no joke.
Still, I can still picture my torn up knee in my mind to this day--that Friday the 13th is stuck in my head forever. So, as yesterday began, I tried to shove the thought of the date out of my mind. I had a job interview and then was going to spend 6 hours driving around LA on a scooter trailing a billboard behind me. (Ah, dayjobs!) The last thing I wanted to do was have Friday the 13th be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I went to my interview and while I kind of expected it to go poorly (they said they weren't hiring, but were interested in "changes" whatever that means) and lo' and behold, it turned out that they were very happy with me and are very interested in having me come work for them. They just need to figure out how it will work. This is not to say that I got an official job offer, but considering I expected nothing from the interview, I think it turned out pretty well.
Next was the scoot across LA. The first bit of luck was that we hit all of my favorite locations in LA save for the center of Hollywood. 3rd Street Promenade, Sunset Strip and my old neighborhood in WeHo (West Hollywood). Along the way we got a lot of people asking us about the company we worked for and so we got to talking to one guy who ended up being a movie producer. He has a friend who is a director of movies for the SciFi channel. He told me that he'd be happy to forward a script on to his friend.
!!!
Considering, I've been working on a screenplay that I am tailoring specifically for the SciFi channel, I fount this to be an extraordinary coincidence. I got his business card, stupidly didn't think to give him mine and was giddy with excitement for the rest of the night.
So, not exactly a bad Friday the 13th, huh?
Boy, it sure took me a while to get to my point, didn't it? Oh well. I like to write long blog entries every once in a while, so shoot me.
Anyway, gotta go work on that script. Wish me luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment