• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 666 0

college I once passed by a booth being run by some kind of Christian group in the student center. They had a big poster that parodied the poster for the then-current film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (what an awful movie that was, by the way). In huge yellow letters in the style of the film’s logo it said, REPENT AND TURN TO GOD.The guy at the booth noticed me looking at the poster and asked me about my beliefs and my relationship to God. Now in those days, I was so punk I rebelled against punk itself by not looking like a punk, and instead sported the dashing look of a stoner. I had long blond hair and dressed exclusively in out-of-fashion bell-bottoms and ratty black T-shirts. The dude in the booth was clean-cut with neatly trimmed hair and a nice conservative suit with the mandatory blue tie. I must have looked like a real prize to him. I’m sure he thought that if he could convert such an obvious heathen as me, he’d definitely get a gold star from God.

But I honestly wanted to know about this whole matter of belief so I asked the guy to explain it to me. The gist of his explanation went something like this: “If a person believed Jesus actually literally did all the miraculous things he’s supposed to have done, that person would be scared of Jesus’ power and would therefore be converted to Christianity. Furthermore, lots of people who actually witnessed Jesus’ miracles with their own eyes chose to die rather than deny what they’d seen. Therefore the Bible is literally true, and therefore we should all be scared. So, REPENT AND TURN TO GOD.”

Like I said, religions never did a lot for me.

Religious people always seemed like they wanted to squeeze my imagination into a little box—and I didn’t even get to decorate the box! My head always hurt listening to these guys. Why was it so important to believe in certain things particularly? Why was it so essential to believe that a long time ago in some part of the world I’ve never been to, someone walked barefoot across a pond without getting wet? What does that have to do with my life right here and right now?

UNLIKE RELIGIONS, Zen doesn’t have a set system of beliefs for you to adopt. One thing that’s always impressed me about Buddhists is that they don’t give a damn about the fact that it’s widely known that many of the words attributed to Buddha were written hundreds of years after his death. “Who cares?” the devout Buddhists say. Because it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The only thing Buddhists believe in is the reality of the world in which we are all living right now. Buddhism is based on your real life as it is, not on whether or not you believe there’s an old guy with a beard above the clouds who will smite you or hand you a harp.

Religion doesn’t have a monopoly on truth. In fact, if you’re anything like me religion is one of the last places you’ll look for truth.

For me, music seemed a much more likely candidate.

INNER ANARCHY

Punk rock is just an excuse for troublemakers who want to mess up the system.

FRANK “PONCH” PONCHARELLO (PLAYED BY ERIK ESTRADA) ON CHIPS

WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I asked my parents for a set of drums. Instead, they got me an orange Stella acoustic guitar with a lame little butterfly on the pick-guard—and bang I was on my way to discovering a new source of truth, something far more meaningful, far more real than any religion in the world, namely: rock and roll.

From that time on, rock and roll was my life. But everything playing on the radio in those days—the mid-to-late ‘70s—was unbelievably lame. I don’t mean that there was a lot of worthless garbage on radio. I mean that every single piece of music you heard on any rock radio station in those days was absolute doggie-do. The most popular bands of the day, corporate rockers like Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Journey, played music that was so bland, so joyless, so unrelentingly, wretchedly awful it was hard to imagine it hadn’t been scientifically designed to induce vomiting—you know, like the stuff the doctors give you to make you puke up the quart Liquid-Plumr