Frivology

“To believe in God is impossible - to not believe in Him is absurd”
- Voltaire

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you believe if you try hard enough it’ll just be a reality?  I’d heard of kids who could talk to spirits or who would have those that were dead to them come back to them, and I desperately wanted my Grandfather to do this - but he didn’t.  Ever.  God didn’t send him my messages, I didn’t get any from Him, and there was never a chance where I felt like anything I ever said laying in my bed and staring at the ceiling every really mattered. 

Disconnecting wasn’t somthing that I did on purpose or with a lot of thought.  I still believed in god - as much as a budding teenager really could - but my belief started to get more and more amorphous.  I took on my mother’s belief that all gods were really one god, and that God, himself, didn’t really need an organized religion to be followed.  In Middle School, Tina and I maintained our close friendship, but as we weren’t in the same classes most of the time, we each developed our own circles.  I spent a lot of time with my nose buried in books or writing, and Tina… well, I never really knew what she did. 

Two of the friends in my circle were self-proclaimed Rastafarians.  We used to take our lunches and sit underneath the stairs near the girl’s locker room to eat, or gather with another one of our friends in homeroom before class started.  I didn’t know then what Rastafarian really was or what it meant, but it seemed to involve a lot of spirituality.   My friends - whose names escape me - spent a lot of time talking about how they could walk in each other’s dreams and tell each other what the other was seeing when they went on these little meditation sessions.  They’d talk animatedly about how they could do all of these cool, supernatural things - things I didn’t believe were happening for one second, but for which I wanted to believe in.  I wanted that sense of purpose and understanding and … coolness … that these girls seemed to have.  Just like I wanted to be haunted by my grandfather. 

So, one day, when Tina and I were at the mall - we bought a Ouija board.   It wasn’t fancy or expensive.  It was made by Mattel and came in a cardboard box.  The board was cardboard and the little thing you hold onto (sorry, I don’t know the technical term) was plastic with a little plastic window to see what letters or numbers you’ve landed on.  We immediately rushed back to Tina’s house, went up to her room and tried to use it.  Our goal?  We wanted to contact the spirits to find out what it was we were getting for Christmas. 

Yes, no.  We weren’t interested in learning what the afterlife was like or in contacting particular relatives.  We just wanted to know what was in all of the gaily wrapped boxes under our Christmas trees.  I’ll tell you all a secret… I moved the little dongle, myself.  I made the predictions.  I picked amorphous things that I knew we’d both be getting for Christmas.  Clothes.  What kind of clothes?  Pants.  My grandma ALWAYS sent me a pair of pants for Christmas.  Always.  We went on like this until we all bored of it, then I ran downstairs to use her phone to call my Rasta friends and brag to them that we’d done somethng special, too. 

They went through the ROOF.  They told us that it was dangerous and foolish to play with Ouija boards, and that by doing so we had asked for evil spirits to come into the house.  They went on to say that we had to do a special ritual and burn the board in order to get rid of it.  We did nothing of the sort.  I kept telling Tina that Mattel wouldn’t put out a product that would be harmful to kids like us who used it.  Still, though, every little thing that happened we attributed to the Ouija board.  It was nearly pure insanity, of course.  I damned well knew that there were no evil spirits in the room.  No magical force guided our fingers.  It was merely the mundane force caused by impulses sent from my brain down to my fingertips.  Yet still, even knowing this, I feared that evil spirits were out to get us - I wanted them to be out to get us because I wanted to be special, too. 

Nothing happened, though.  That night, Tina’s mother overfilled the cast iron stove that heated their little house and we all woke up far too hot.  It wasn’t heat from the firey pits of hell, though.  Opening the door and drinking some icewater while we played Super Mario Brothers on Tina’s Nintendo staved off the heat, and we were soon back to sleep.  The Ouija board went on the bottom of Tina’s games shelf, never to be used again.  No evil spirits followed us around, no awful things happened to us and, miraculously, all of the stupid little predictions I made came true. 

Amazingly, even after all that, I still craved the sort of open acceptance and clear understanding that my friends who supposedly had amazing things happen to them seemed to feel.  The Rastafarians were later joined by a supposed Satan worshipper, and I spent much of my time soul-searching.  No one invited me to join them, and I didn’t ask to be brought into their little sphere of weird religions… I just somehow remained an observer and a listener. 

It wouldn’t be until High School that religion became a major part of my life again.

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