Seven years ago today, I was minding my own business when I found a Beak, and blah blah blah. If you don’t know this story by now, I’ve told a version of it almost every year since this site’s inception, and there are only so many ways to say, “There was just a Beak sitting there by itself.”

This year, though, I actually have some good news for the annual State of the Beak address. Not about the website, mind you; that’s still unknown and infrequently updated, and I’m honestly starting to like it that way. No, the good news is about, well, everything else. For example, though I may have given up on my New Year’s resolution to complete and sell a comic book, I have managed to design a couple shirts, and to sell a few dozen of them for a small profit. It’s not enough to make a proper living or anything, but it is proof of concept — I could scale this up and turn it into a sonofabitchin’ business. I now spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about wholesalers and invoices and all the things that people much more important than me think about. I might even turn out to be good at this.

On top of that, I’ve been repainting (and thoroughly renovating parts of) my apartment, learning to prepare and roll clove cigarettes at home, and printing up a special order of shirts for International Blasphemy Day, which you can see to the right of this text.

That’s all been within the last couple of weeks. And yesterday I replaced the DVD drive in my computer.

Oh, and the fucking G20 Summit is happening in Pittsburgh (you know, where I live) right fucking now. Protesters were stomping through my neighborhood last night and applying seriously flawed methods to an otherwise good cause, which is my polite way of saying some windows got broken. I should head down there and make sure the dinosaur is okay.

In short, I have been busy doing things I didn’t plan for, even as interesting times unfold right outside my window. Also there is a dinosaur. That, my friends, is exactly the sort of life I’ve been trying to encourage (and achieve). I set aside this one day every year to reflect on how I’ve been doing — perhaps a bad idea in the current, genuinely scary political climate. But the horrors of modern life will still be there tomorrow, and I’ll still be outraged. Glenn Beck will still be lying, Congress will still be spineless, and all your favorite things will still suck.

I’ve got mere months left before I leave Pittsburgh, and for once I can say with absolute confidence that the state of the Beak is strong.

The Ridiculous Work of a Prophet:

Six years ago today, I found a Beak on the porch outside a University of Pittsburgh building, showed it to some friends (without actually touching the filthy thing, of course), and set off a slow-motion freakout that continues to this day.

Having declared myself Prophet of the Beak, I had unwittingly handed myself a list of responsibilities I didn’t fully understand, since most of them were quite silly and unnecessary. What the hell did a prophet — and an atheist prophet at that — actually do? I couldn’t see the future, and even if I could, that seemed like a needlessly literal interpretation of the job description. I couldn’t lead people out of slavery or oppression. My attempts to found a religion met with little success, though I stand by my claim that the religion itself was solid.

But I had already registered the domain name, so I stuck a blog on there and ignored it for months at a time. Recently, I cleaned up the HTML and made the page a bit prettier, and that motivated Horatio and me to post more (like, a lot more), but it still didn’t seem like the work of a prophet, even when you define prophet-work as broadly as I do. Indeed, I was beginning to regret bestowing that title on myself.

My friends were (and are) a nice mix of mystics and atheists, with plenty of gray in between, but I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the mystic faction. If they believed in what they were doing in the woods (or wherever the hell people do that stuff), why were they so reluctant to talk about it. When I asked them how X worked, the reply was inevitably, “Well, X can’t really be explained.” If that was true, wouldn’t that imply it could still be explained badly? I was willing to settle for that. Prophets need to do their research.

But what do today’s mystics — the sort of people who fancy themselves prophets and take it seriously — really hope to achieve? They aren’t doing Harry Potter magic, and even the magic you read about in new age bookstores is mostly discussed in terms of metaphor. As the owner of a useless English degree, I like a good metaphor, but I didn’t want my spiritual well-being to hinge on my ability to talk myself into taking it literally.

All the trappings of mysticism — magic, meditation, and a whole range of rituals of varying craziness — are metaphors for perfectly mundane thought processes (relatively speaking; they’re still pretty weird, but there’s a boring, rational explanation for them). Just because I reject the metaphors doesn’t mean I have to reject the results. A ritual achieves nothing that simply sitting down and thinking about a problem won’t achieve just as nicely. The only difference is that most people regard their rituals as “special,” and as such assign undue importance to the topics addressed therein.

Saying you want something is just saying it. Praying about it is… also just saying it, but you’re making a bigger deal out of it. And that’s the only reason it works. People stick to their promises once they think God is involved.

If I didn’t believe in any of the available metaphors, what the hell did I believe in? Very little, it turns out, beyond a sense that humans possess a talent for thinking their way out of some really horrifying problems. And that’s more than enough to be a damn good atheist prophet.

You want some prophetic advice? How about this? You know all those problems that you ignore until you get the brilliant idea to ask the gods or spirits or tarot cards or whatever for help? Spend some time thinking about them in a totally non-mystical setting. Let them into your brain and leave them running as a background process while you go about your day. I have no idea how well that works, but I know it isn’t any less effective than eating Jesus-bread or tracing pentagrams in the air.

For all the people who have been wondering for the last six years, that’s it. That’s the mystical philosophy of the Order of the Beak. All the benefits of spiritual weirdness, with none of the dogma or discipline; “Know thyself” with a fresh coat of paint and (if I’m lucky) a fat price tag for any chumps who want further instruction.

It’s September 25, 2008, and the State of the Beak is strong.

Last year, I made an animated Beaksmas special for a few friends, and they liked it. This year, I made a new one and posted it on YouTube so that more than ten people will have a chance to see it.

The usual warnings apply — it’s got a lot of inside jokes and senseless violence. Plus some foul language, though not as much as usual. On the upside, it has Christmas Ogres.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the day I found a beak. It was lying on the porch of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, slightly out of the way, its origins a mystery. There were no signs of a struggle, no indication that someone’s precious Mister Whiskers had been starting shit. The scene of the apparent crime was devoid of feathers and blood; there was only the beak.

My friends have heard this story more times than I care to count, due mostly to the fact that they kept introducing Horatio and me to people who hadn’t heard it yet. If I end up following Horatio and Princess Wolfsbane to New York next year, I’ll find plenty of opportunities to tell it again. As stories go, it’s something of an attention-getter. Disgusting though it may be, finding a beak, sans bird, is just weird enough to make an audience curious.

Weirder than finding a beak, as this audience soon learns, is the fact that no one else found it first. As far as I know, nobody else even noticed it. I admit it was a few yards from most of the foot traffic, but the Cathedral porch was (and remains) a popular spot to stand around and talk with your friends, or at least smoke with them. Still, even with all these potential witnesses, none of them took notice of the beak in their midst.

Once I realized what I was looking at, something– call it madness– compelled me to stake out the area and point out the oddity to whoever I thought would listen. It wasn’t long before I ran into an acquaintance of mine, a bit of a dick really, and one of his friends, and introduced them to the beak. After a few dull minutes of trying to explain to them why this was awesome, I found a more sympathetic audience in the form of Horatio and Captain Fun and told them of my discovery.

They could dig it. We set to work.

We drew a chalk shrine around the site where the beak was discovered and maintained it for several months afterward, even when the janitors washed it away on a near-daily basis. We wrote ridiculous scriptures detailing the mystical history of the beak. We started capitalizing the word “Beak.” We added nearly everyone we knew to our ranks. We devised a Beakly calendar. We clashed with the campus police on several occasions, mostly due to our (washable) vandalism and our attempts to sacrifice a potato to the Beak. It was all very silly, but it certainly felt like we were accomplishing something.

Four years later, on the fifth Day of the Beak, what has become of these young prophets-to-be? Why did we tone down the goofy mysticism? How the hell did we all manage to graduate? How could people who were already so bitter become so bitter? Why didn’t we sell out and live off the T-shirt money? Didn’t we have a band at one point in there? In short, did we fail?

Of course I’ll say we didn’t. We’re all still alive, more or less, and the handful of us who still care about the Beak have tried to lead lives in line with the philosophy we established. That’s very Zen of us and all, but when a movement is as new as ours we should probably focus on increasing our profile. Finding a comfortable worldview is nice, but it does sort of keep you from winning converts with mystical bullshit and garish rituals. Maybe we should re-open our propaganda wing.

There’s been positive stuff too, of course. We’ve been called the heirs of the Discordian movement, for crying out loud! Considering our admiration for the Discordians (and their always-awesome goddess Eris), this is both a tremendous honor and a huge amount of pressure. In forty years, will the lovable freaks of the world pass our books around once they’ve retired the bong for the evening? Does that mean we’ll have to write some books?

Writing a book about this stuff doesn’t seem too terrible, nor does taking modern-day Discordians to task for failing to continue the decidedly cool work of their forebears. Then again, we’ve made promises like that every year (usually in private) and have yet to keep them.

If we absolutely must make a statement, let’s just say we’re at a crossroads. No matter which way we go, we’ll end up somewhere Beakly; the real mystery is how long it will take before we get the actual work done.

And if that isn’t the definition of the Way of the Beak, I don’t know what is.