April 12, 2026
This post is about junior high.
Well, it’s about more than that, but it starts in junior high.
The photograph is of the “Ninth Grade Honor Society” at Rincon Valley Junior High in…oh, I don’t know… probably the Fall of 1971. The guy in the front with the attitude…the one I want to smack upside his head…that’s me. The one in the back who looks maybe a little miffed? That’s Cathy.
She wasn’t mad at me…at least I don’t think she was… but I wouldn’t blame her if she was. I was not strong on humility.
Those of you who know us know our views on religion differ slightly. My faith in faith has been…well…unfaithful. If you pull up “Belief-O-Matic” and answer their 20-question quiz (you should try it; it’s fun), I hover somewhere between a “Born Again Pagan” and a “Devout Agnostic
https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/quizzes/beliefomatic.aspx
This is sometimes frustrating to Cathy who, though equally skeptical of organized religion, is open to spirituality. Not “Capital-S Spirituality” like crystal healing, numerology and astral projection, but “Lower Case-s” spirituality. Cathy believes, like Einstein, that there is an order in our universe that transcends random coincidence. An order, we humans, stuck in the junior high phase of our evolutionary development, are as yet incapable of understanding.
Not me.
The one exception to my conviction that there is no “Big-G-God, no “Little-g-gods”, and no sign of a grand design in the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Sequence, is the occasional allowance I make for the possibility that, if there is a God, he’s pissed at me.
And rightly so.
I harken back to the Greeks who saw their gods as thin-skinned deities who easily took offence at human hubris. You know…like…I don’t know…say…self-important adolescents who somehow manage to find their way to the front of the photo, but then cop an attitude like they’re pained to be there.
I wish I could go back in time and talk to that arrogant kid. If I could, I’d tell him that God has a long memory and a wicked sense of humor. He likes good irony. Good word play. Poetic justice. Better to dial back the ‘tude, dude. Hang out in the back row with Cathy, lest the big guy send you a little late-in-life-pharma-karma.
How to put this?
The trouble with running around like you’ve got a stick up your ass is that God…well…he might just fit you for a stick just to show a “Stuck-Up” kid what “Stuck Up” really means.
Young Rob? Listen to old Rob. He knows.
He knows that old age is a series of carefully tailored indignities designed to teach the slow to learn self-important that they’re not at all important and to maybe, just maybe, think about someone other than themselves.
In the past four months, I’ve had a catheter pushed up and pulled out of my poor Mr. Happy more times than I can count. I’ve had two cystoscopies where my Santa Rosa urologist ran a scope up the aforesaid…and now just more sad…Mr. Happy. One colonoscopy where my Petaluma gastro-team, not to be outdone, ran a scope in from the California side hoping to meet my Santa Rosa uro-team at Promontory Summit. And one fun cross-it-off-your-bucket-list experience called a prostate artery embolization where, having run out of the usual orifices…orrifi?… my Oakland interventional radiologist ran a pee shooter up my right femoral artery and blasted the capillaries feeding my tennis ball sized prostate with enough microspheric buck shot to bring down a good size mallard.
I get it God. It’s not hard to pick up your “Stick-it-Up-Your [fill in the blank]” theme.
“One more,” you say.
“That’s really not necessary,” I say. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
“No,” you say. “I’m not sure you have.”
“Well,” I say. “I’d love to accommodate you, but I think we’ve run out of portals to stick stuff in to drive home your point.”
“For a head-case like you, Rob,” you say tapping my head. “We’ll make a new one.”
“Really,” I say. “It’s not…”
“Right about here,” you say, thumping harder on the top of my head. “Should sink in if we can just get behind that thick skull I fitted you with when you were born.”
Gulp.
Can't Hold Still 