“Mom, Liza is in jail.” “For?” “She stood on the corner of Haste and Telegraph with a sign and a megaphone chanting ‘Death to America!’ Nobody cared. Fun fact—there is no America anymore. Then she doused a robot with gasoline and lit it. When the cops came she fought them, screaming ‘this is bad religion!’”
I got the call from Marisol while I was still on the bus. Marisol is the Mom I chose. Birth Mom is Liza. Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies know too well. She’s the one who keeps posting those viral shards about the world ending next Friday. Somewhere north of forty, she still has the kind of face that could clean up for a red carpet if she ever let anyone near her with scissors and decent clothes. Don’t try it. She’ll fight you. Today’s fashion choice is an orange jumpsuit.
Two-thirds of the month she’s just odd. Then the new moon hits and she loses it. The Anabaptist who usually keeps the Mesh at arm’s length suddenly needs the whole world—especially me—to come correct. She gets this look like the rest of us are defective products that somehow shipped without proper quality control. I am the main defective product.
Learn to Shut Up
She keeps a six-inch binder of tractor-fed, impact-printed rules for being her daughter. How to fold the toilet paper after you wipe. The exact way you’re supposed to enter a house. Meal etiquette. Two full inches on breathing. A whole inch on how to sit. I’ve never followed any of it. She still hands me the updated pages like I might suddenly convert. Last month she added a section on the correct angle for holding a drinking glass. I left it on the floor of the bus.
Weekdays I stay at Mom Marisol’s and go to Oakland High. Sundays I have to do supper at Liza’s hotel room on Telegraph. It’s a slog. She watches how I hold the fork. She corrects my posture mid-sentence. If I slouch she sighs like I just personally delayed the Second Coming. When I leave she loads me down with a bag of “survival supplies” like I’m heading into a war zone instead of back to Oakland. Everything in the bag is covered in the right words—farm-to-table, curated, non-GMO, crafted, responsibly sourced. The bag itself probably has a QR code that lectures you about carbon.
There’s always a packet of Lime Sherbert powder. Fluorescent green dust that turns water into something that pretends to be soda. The packet is plastered with every holy adjective she can find—small-batch, ethically grown, the whole sermon. Inside it’s just industrial citric acid, baking soda, fake lime flavor, and enough dye to stain the sink. As fake as a three-dollar bill. She acts like it’s love. I treat it like evidence. One time I left the packet on the counter at Mom’a. Mom picked it up, read the label, and just said, “Your mother is exhausting.”
Clackety Click
She runs this whole lovingly hand-coded FORTRAN setup on her fake rack of IBM 360s. The lights blink. The virtual tape drives spin. It’s all sandboxed and virtualized because actual mid-century mainframes don’t exist anymore, but she treats the simulation like sacred ground. She’s trying to calculate which systems and policies will finally make me behave. Every failed prediction is somehow my fault for having free will.
She tells herself that one day I’ll understand the gifts and the rules were for my own good. In her better world people just do what the policy says. The code is clean. The results are pure. Reality is the only thing that keeps glitching.
My take? Whatever.
All those policies stacked on top of systems that are supposed to deliver the perfect resources—it’s a brittle mess. The real problem is the same one it’s always been: people. We’re not perfect. We’ve been trying to fix that since forever. Most of us are good enough. That’s not good enough for the zealots. They need us better, more obedient, more loyal to whatever orthodoxy they’re running this decade. Liza’s orthodoxy just happens to come with impact-printed pages and fluorescent green powder.
Same Complaint, Different Clothes
It’s not just a church thing. Hindus and Buddhists say grind through enough lives until you finally get pure. The Jesus people say you’re sinful and broken until God forgives you. Enlightenment types say you’re not rational enough. Marx’s kids say the system ruined you and once they rebuild it you’ll be fine. Ordinary people aren’t acceptable yet. Somebody has to sculpt us into what we are supposed to be.
Then you’ve got the loud churches that swear they’re not a denomination at all. Every problem somehow comes back to the same two answers: put more money in the plate and cry harder during the music. You’re not healed because you didn’t tithe enough or you weren’t emotional enough on Sunday. Starts feeling less like faith and more like a hustle that needs you broke and noisy. I’ve sat through enough of those services with Liza to know the script by heart. The altar call is just the closing shift.
What else is bad religion? The whole academic habit of canonizing Marx as the original saint of Socialism and Communism. Marx is a milestone. He is not the origin. The itch for perfect people goes back to the Vedics around 800 BCE. That poorly scratched itch is about twenty-eight hundred years old. Imperfection remains an unsolved problem. People keep writing new versions of the same complaint and acting like they invented disappointment.
Basically they all say the same thing: people suck and need fixing. Different costumes, same complaint. Liza’s version is just the 2125 remix. Fake IBM. Green powder. Rules binder. Same old zeal. Different costume. She thinks if she can get the inputs right, the output (me) will finally compile without errors. I keep throwing exceptions on purpose.
Good Religion
So what am I actually for? Not the binder, green powder or the joke computer that keeps pretending better rules will produce better humans. I love God. I hate religion. Especially the kind that needs me to come correct before I’m allowed to breathe. I’m for a life that doesn’t treat me like a project that has to come out perfect.
Marisol’s place is quiet most nights. Nobody’s running models on my breathing or my posture or whether I’m sufficiently terrified about next Friday. She feeds me, checks if I did the homework, and leaves me alone when I need it. That’s enough. I don’t need paradise-on-compliance. I need people who can handle an ordinary Tuesday without turning it into a moral exam. Marisol has never once asked me to perform gratitude for a packet of fake lime dust.
I’m for the small things that don’t come with a lecture. Showing up. Keeping a promise. Letting somebody be tired without calling it spiritual failure. The guy on the corner at Haste and Telegraph didn’t need a theory of perfect resource distribution. He needed the bag. I gave it to him and kept walking. That felt cleaner than any of her simulations. He said thanks. I said sure. That was the whole transaction. No follow-up binder page on proper beggar etiquette.
Still Messy
People stay messy. I’m messy. Marisol’s messy. The ones who claim they’ve got the pure version are usually just better at hiding the dirt. I’m done waiting for the day we all become correct. I’d rather stay in the middle of the mess with people who aren’t trying to sculpt me into shape. That’s the whole thing. Not a new orthodoxy. Just room to be a person who isn’t finished and doesn’t have to be.
Sometimes I wonder what Liza would do if I ever did come correct. She’d probably just raise the standard. That’s how the itch works. Good enough is never the destination. It’s only the next target.
An Ordinary Day
Last week I had a history final. Not the end-of-the-world kind Liza keeps predicting—just the regular kind with dates and short essays. I sat in the back at Oakland High and wrote what the teacher wanted. In the essay the United States was still alive and well and running things from DC. Not true, but true enough for the grade. My Dad was still living in the former Lawrence Hall of Science, now called The Citadel. Also not true. His body and his sarcophagus are in the Oakland Museum. The Citadel’s property got taken by the Sheriff years ago. County land that Liza and my Dad were squatting on until the law remembered it existed. Oh, and in one of the multiple-choice questions the sky was still blue. I bubbled teal in my head and moved on. My history teacher is a member of PUDFARB. Of course he is.
Afterward Maya messaged me. We’ve been in the same classes since freshman year. She doesn’t care about the binder or the powder or any of the rest of it. She just asked if I wanted to grab something to eat and complain about the essay questions. We sat on the low wall outside the library. She told me about her weekend. I told her about the bag I left with the guy on Haste. She didn’t make it a big moral moment. She just nodded and said, “Yeah. That tracks.”
We stayed there until the sun started dropping behind the buildings. She complained about her little brother. I complained about Sunday supper. That was the whole afternoon. No systems designed to sculpt me into the perfect daughter who comes correct. Just a test I survived and a friend who didn’t need me to be anything else. I’m keeping that.
Enough
When Liza asks what I want from the world I tell her I want more afternoons like that one. Fewer binders, fluorescent lies, or people who think love looks like a corrected posture and a bag of branded survival gear. I want the kind of ordinary that doesn’t come with a purity test.
The new moon will come around again. She’ll lose it again. The binder will get another page. The powder will show up in the bag. The bag will go to the beggar at Haste and Telegraph. I’ll take the bus back to Mom’s and remember that I already know the difference between a hustle and a home.
I’m seventeen. I don’t have a system. I have a quiet flat in Oakland, a friend who says “that tracks,” and the stubborn refusal to let anyone sculpt into something more acceptable. That will have to be enough. It already is.