Chapter 14

The portfolio and the new start

"OK, here it is!" giggled Pita as she handed over the resume/portfolio. "You like it?"

Me: "Nice, very nice. I like the wine-colored folder with the clear front. Very pro-looking."

Phil: "Check out the back - look inside the back cover."

There I found a CD which matched the cover and was the same motif and theme as the front cover.

Pita: "Go ahead, leaf through it. Everything is there."

I turned back to the front and went through it page by page. All the graphic design work I had ever done was in there. Newsletters and brochures, magazines, tshirts, buttons, banners, websites and animations - everything graphic I had done and wanted to do. CD multimedia collections I had just worked on. Everything artistic and cutting edge. Marvelous. A whole portfolio in a slim folder.

Phil: "And it all fits on the CD, including the video animation. Your CD's that you created are all there, on a website which autoloads when you insert in a PC. A lot of work, but nothing you couldn't do on your own. We just wanted to give you a leg up."

Pita: "Everything integrates and works together. Colors in the portfolio folder are complementary to the CD, which is actually the color scheme of the website you see on the CD."

Me: "So this is supposed to work out there?"

Phil: "Well, as near as we can research from here. While you've stayed out all night those many times paying for all that broadband at Kinko's, we still don't know what they really want out there. We've checked into and reviewed all those articles in your computer mags about how to get a job and frankly this is our best guess.

"We figure that something in all you can do is what would be wanted out there, so give them a nice shopping list of talents to pick from."

Pita: "But look in the back - we've even printed out some simple, two-page samples to leave with them."

Those were definately cool. Nicely laid out, photo and all. Both sides nicely set up so that the information was simple to get and understand. Should do the trick - their guess was as good as mine.

- - - -

That was the real kicker to the piece. The whole scene predicated on the other not truly understanding what the each other was about. I had dived into the Center, giving it my whole life while I considered that no one knew how the basic thing worked out there.

But after giving the Center 20 years, I found that their system didn't work except in the narrow confines of their own little world.

The oddity is that the Center continued to exist as a subset of the "outside world," encysted in its own little scene, but continuing to exist because the outside world continued to exist. Rhino had warned consistently and continually that the outside world was going to collapse, that it was filled with well-meaning, but misguided people who wanted nothing better than to have the Center destroyed, that massive plots had tried to do this in the past, but had failed, and other factors were arising which would try again in the future, etc., etc., etc.

But observation showed that the world was becoming slowly less combative. The Cold War had ended and the world economy in the 90's was going very well. Under Carter, there had been some unemployment problems, but Presidents since had seemed to have it under control and doing well. People elected these rulers and the sub-ruler below them, and those below them, to the most simple positions which someone thought they should have voter control over.

Yet the Center wasn't exactly behnind voting, or reading the news or keeping informed about everything so one could responsibly vote. They were encysted within this society they lived in, being part of the great "Silent Majority" which existed for so long.

The odd point was that the world kept turning, not getting particularly worse, but seeming to keep slowly improving. Personal computers were one point which was a unique factor out there and internally to the Center. People could now do more with less. Another was the Internet. People could communicate with each other in fascinating ways - fascinating because it was fast and could be in both text as well as by music or video or slideshow.

This was the death knell of the Center. People could talk freely to each other and exchange views on various topics. So closed orders like the Center didn't like the Internet and actively sought to limit its effect on those within its ranks. While the rather innocent cults like the Amish certainly eschewed anything modern, the modern cults like the Center also found reason to keep people from using it.

The Center had had all of its supposedly secret programming posted on the Internet at various places, where they they spread and were cached in innumerous locations. Essentially, this doomed the Center, since it no longer could say it had some monopoly on mental treatment. It was simply placed into the same line of competition as any other self-help movement. And with the materials up on the Internet, they could be dissected at leisure by any who were inclined. (Although the Center warned that people would go insane after reading them unless properly "prepared" - no one did after a major LA newspaper printed such excerpts to all its millions of LA readers.)

So the world still had some system which it worked from to keep going and keep, at least in the North American continental mass and the greater parts of Europe the rest of the world, a workable peace where global trade could prosper.

The Center only continued to exist because of the protection of the law of this land and its own policies about not interfering with commerce. The Center had factually wages some legal battles to secure this right of them to operate, but on the whole, it was because they tried to break those rules so many times earlier.

The Center was an encysted mass within a larger mass, the latter considering the former a mere speck or dot, which it had so many of and the larger mass actually thrived because of the diversity of the specks and dots within it, each interacting with the others in various degrees.

Since I had come to the Center to find an underlying system which would answer how things worked, I was neither better nor worse off than when I started, just 20 years older and a lot more experienced.

This is what I was taking with me. I had all the interesting knowledge of how the Center worked and as well a great deal of practical experience in dealing with people and seeing how they operated. I also knew how strict dogma could "throw the baby out with the bath water." By insisting on a rigid format, one could then deny the possible gains which certain talented individuals could achieve, in order to ensure that the bulked mass of people would follow the rules to get the average result.

Some of these doubts were due to my own Midwest upbringing which questioned all authority, having to "be shown" the proof of any concept before accepting it as such. This was made more acute with me, since I worked as a troubleshooting consultant within the Center framework, who was supposed to fix the people who broke, those who didn't apply the laid down policy exactly. So I had to know all the policy or know where to find it, and how to get people to apply this.

At the end of several years of this, I had studied and mentally cross-indexed all sorts of policies and references which Rhino had written and made the dogma of the Center. In doing this, I was then able to interpret actions and activities as either being in compliance with or out of compliance with various policies. I was able to determine the exact point they went off the rails. I was also able to then work out simple programs which would return them to complying with these policies and so bring them back into the ranks and supposedly more prosperity.

Along this line, I found which policies worked in what circumstances, and kept a mental track of what policies tended to break and due to what. I found many, many short-cuts which would enable people to get policy back in faster, and found many, many situations which consistently broke the mold, regardless of any policy.

It was the unwritten policies which were the worst. Worst only because they were agreed upon by so many, not because they were some mental "aberration" common to humanity, but that the Center programming or policy consistently didn't address them.

It was these unwritten, common, pervasive policies which were actually running the Center, as a current below the surface. These were not destructive policies, but they were those which were common to humanity. The Center was actually using these common human operating bases as a carrier wave to get their own message out to these people.

"You see those things out there which are bad?" they'd say, "Well, we can help you fix these things up so you feel better about them and are able to control them better. We've figured out all the short-cuts which will help you quickly regain control over your own life."

To a great degree, they were right. They could help people with a great deal of problems in their lives. The kicker was not in what they could do, but what they couldn't do. And the key to both of them was what I wanted when I joined them. And didn't particularly find.

What I had done for 20 years was to follow their dogma as best I could while I worked on understanding the rest of it. After 20 years, I found that it did indeed work no better than it was applied, just as they said. But I found that people consistently were not applying it, due ostensibly to an inherent failure in the system itself, but on closer look was due to the fact that this was a mere veneer on top of a very thick base which had been running for time without end througout humankind's culture.

But all the studies I would attempt to discover these or to trace down this mass of data were thwarted by the very environment I had been part of. Cults are called that because they don't allow people to find out stuff beyond their proscribed boundaries.

Ultimately, I had to test these boundaries and find out how rigid or permeable they were. Once I found that they were factually as thin as gossamer and as resistive as the fog that collects in a draw on cool morning, I knew there was nothing keeping me in my place except myself.

After that, the simple comparison was whether I was better off within the Center confines or out in the world on my own. The single factor was whether I was going to be able to do what I wanted.

I wanted to do art. The Center didn't care to keep me in what I was really wanting to do, but what was needed at the moment. But you were supposed to keep working at what they wanted you to do about 16 hours a day for most of 7 days a week, including all holidays.

The Outside didn't care. But after one worked out how to make a living and keep fed and clothed, it didn't care what else you did with your life. Sometimes you even got paid for holidays.

So the outside would enable me to figure all this out. The inside would keep preventing me from doing so.

Hence the truck, loading it, and moving to the Midwest. Hence the resume and portfolio to explain myself to the world outside.

And so this story began...