Strange musings from the bakery:
And David Koresh was the valedictorian

By David Baker

April 25, 2008 | I've been wearing my cap and gown around lately. I paid like 30 bucks for the bastard, so I'm going to get my money's worth. There have been some adverse effects, though.

Going naked underneath the gown, although freeing, has created some chaffing and an increased probability of me getting arrested for indecent exposure, especially if a stiff breeze happened to come up. And, I assure you, it wouldn't be a magical moment like Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch" -- women and children would weep, angels would lose their wings and kittens would be struck blind.

Maybe it's my attire or all the people asking me about graduating, but that ceremony seems to be on my mind lately.

I've never graduated from college and everyone I know that have done it were too drunk to remember the details, so I haven't really been able to get the student perspective yet. I'm going into it with no advice, not that I listen to my friends' advice -- if I did that, I would surely be incarcerated somewhere in middle America right now. But, I assume it mostly revolves around phrases like, "bored to death," "waste of time," "major buzzkill" and "good time to get a nap before the party."

I watched one college graduation, and it scared the living @#$% out of me.

It all looks like one big cult ritual.

First, you have all these people in black robes marching in lock-step formation, wearing silly hats. This army of sheep are all glossy-eyed, like their minds are in other place.

You can tell the leaders, because they're in different colored, often more garish, robes. They sit above and in front of the black sea of followers, gazing out over the flock, making sure no one gets out of line.

Then there are a series of speakers, orating about the future and going out into the world and succeeding. But the speakers at a graduation are usually boring, lacking the charisma of a cult leader who whips his army into a fervor with his words. Most graduation speakers are lucky to keep their audiences from nodding off and drooling on the person sitting next to them.

But those speeches probably have influenced at least a few people to drink cyanide-laced Kool Aid -- so maybe the graduation speech isn't too far from some whacko marching orders issued by the Grand Poobah, whose wearing a hat made of the bones of rotisserie chicken.

Near the end of the ceremony, the followers even rise when they are told to, march in sections when they are told to, and sit when they're told to. It's not just the following of the instructions that's so troubling -- dogs can follow instructions, that doesn't mean they're likely to be in a cult. Or are they? A dog cult, led by Cesar Milan, who will use his four-pawed minions to take over the world, or at least make sure everyone wears those goofy-ass rollerblades -- it's the precision that the mass movements are executed with that scares me.

The end of the graduation ceremony isn't the same as what I'd imagine the end of a cult meeting would be like. Instead of sacrificing a collection of stray cats, the graduates just throw their caps. And then a lot of the kids get to hug their parents and take Facebook pictures with their friends. That's nothing like a cult gathering, because I always thought very few of the faceless sheep made it out alive. It's my understanding that most either ingest poison or light themselves on fire to get to some strange parallel universe. Either way, they usually don't set up well for self-pics with your camera phone.

I guess graduating isn't exactly like being present at a cult gathering, but I'll still be on my toes -- that's assuming that I'm sober enough to stay upright the whole time.

MS
MS