... that your kids will be ensnared by some weird religious cult? That they might become Republicans, or worse? Now there's an answer: a safe, wholesome, ecologically sound religious cult the whole family can join!

No need to deal with complicated and difficult-to-understand supernatural forces!
Not necessary to memorize puzzling scriptural passages in archaic dialects!
No vexing sexual or dietary requirements, such as castration or drinking wheatgrass juice!
Mass suicide or weird costumes are not required!
No obligation to sacrifice nubile female family members to priapic preachers!
And, best of all: No need to live in poverty to buy limos and luxury retreats for gurus and swamis!

Here's how it works:

'Way back in the legendary '60s, a small, colorful band of farsighted nature lovers, inspired with the wisdom of all out-of-doors and certain all-natural sacramental substances, discovered a startling truth: Things are going downhill. Though our great Rocky Mountains are indescribably uplifting, they have a down side. The elemental forces of erosion, glaciation, and Texian souvenir hunting will reduce the Rockies to a vast gravel plain in but a few million years, just as they have been in previous, really boring geological epochs. This will not only ruin the view, it will spell catastrophe even for the all-powerful Vail Ski Area, the Microsoft of outdoor recreation, which shows there's some good in almost everything.

You've seen them, lying around convenience stores or church parking lots, lining driveways or shoveled into the medians and traffic islands of city streets and forgotten: The pathetic pebbles, stunned stones, raging river rocks and crushed lava that once inhabited our wilderness and tasted the pure air of freedom. Now these once-proud descendants of our uplifting geological heritage have been brought down to an igneous existence, taken for granite among the cigarette butts and candy wrappers of a concrete jungle. Remember the pet rocks craze of years past? Thousands of pet rocks, having lost the ability to live wild, were released into the city once their owners tired of them. Gravel and coral from the aquaria of people whose fish died lie dazed and bleaching out behind the garage. It's just not gneiss!

The plight of this rubble without a cause hardened those first visionaries' resolve to avert the grim, Kansas-like fate awaiting our purple mountains' majesties, to reverse the gravitational degradation that threatens the Rockies' montane magnificence. For over thirty years, the heroes and heroines of the Disadvantaged Stone Foundation have been waging an uphill battle against what they refuse to acknowledge as inevitable.

Don't just say,

"It's not my asphalt!" Get involved. Become one of the Gatherers Of Disadvantaged Stones. There are two easy ways to become one of the GODS. Send full particulars about yourself by e-mail to the e-mail address below,sjust in case some day the Church Fathers and Mothers get around to setting aside their glasses of absinthe long enough to print some handsome, suitable-for-framing certificates of membership in the Peripatetic Pantheon. It could happen! Or simply buddy up with a depressed boulder of suitable size, haul it up to some high point of indescribable magnificence, and leave it there, a testament to your nature as a cairn person. It's just that simple. Accept these stones into your heart.

But one caution: this spiritual practice is deceptively simple, but surprisingly difficult. Mind-fuddling gravitational vibrations propagated in the tectonic plates can banjax spiritual perfection by fostering forgetfulness behaviors. A thousand feet up the clean granite of The Diamond, one suddenly recalls leaving the chosen pebble in the parking lot of the Estes Park Dairy Queen. And do not give in to the temptation to cheat by simply stashing a few deserving rocklets conveniently in your backpack. For while the conveying of disadvantaged stones to altitudinous prominences of scenic power does indeed accrue karmic attaboys, absent-mindedly carrying them back down again can bring on a horrific curse in which the body's petrine appendage inexorably turns to rancid mozzarella.

And please share your disadvantaged stone experiences with others, your uplifting stories and keep up with the latest theological corruscations of the Church. Now get those hiking boots, those skis, even snowshoes, for as the Welsh poet Robert Zimmerman tells us, "Everybody must get stoned."

Back to the Wittier Neighborhood!