The only SubGenius at a Hare Krishna funeral

My father died two weeks ago-he rolled off of his bed and expired on
the floor at the age of 84, locked in the giant house where he had
lived alone for the past 20 years like Howard Hughes,
trapped by mounds of old papers, magazines, expired health food
supplements and dirty laundry. My mother and brother broke in the
door and found him a day later. I got the call in Japan and caught a
flight home two days later to deal with the physical and the legal
mess he had left behind.

As the historian in the family I got the job of writing the obituary
which was published in the San Diego Union Tribune on Sunday Feb. 18
"A pioneering Mexican-American aerospace engineer" it glosses,
who "worked as a reliability engineer and Senior Lab Head for such
projects as the Atlas missile, the DC-10, and the
F-16." Dad was one for the books. There was one sentence
that was deleted at the insistence of my mother and younger brother:
"[His] lifelong quest for spiritual enlightenment took him from the
Methodism of his family through Transcendental Meditation to
the International Society for Krnsa Consciousness."

Yeah, dad got into the krishnoids seriously from about 1975-1985,
probably after buying a flower and getting a phamplet from a
street missionary.

My younger brother's old bedroom was turned into a Krishna altar room
with a raised granite platform surronded on three walls by an ornate
painted mural complete with sacred cows and a dancing blue Lord Krsna,
who suspiciously resembled my father's favorite pop singer, Michael
Jackson. Dad threw vegetarian parties for his new Krsna friends and
chanted with them but when it came time to change into orange robes
and sign over his worldly possessions he balked. I found an official
letter from the Grand Poobah of the San Diego Krishnoids introducing
Dad as an active member and asking for other Krishnoids anywhere in
the world to render him all assistance. But sometime in 1986 my
father retreated into a pattern of clinical paranoia and depression
which centered around his delusions that "the Bad People' were
breaking into his house to either steal things or move them around, or
they were bombarding him with microwaves or stealing his savings on
the internet. Bummer. The Krsna people went the way of all his other
friends and in the end only my Mom (who he had divorced in 1977) came
around to check he had food and to guard the house while he left for a
few hours for errands or trips to the doctor.

It would have been nice to throw him a full fledged funeral with
chanting Krsna devotees and flowers and do whatever rituals they do,
but in the end it was the Neptune society and a simple cremation. As
a SubGenius I would have loved to have honored him by carrying out any
bizarre cultish wishes he had for his funeral, but as there were none
we had to make them up. In the end my brother and I were in agreement
- just take his ashes back to his home country, Mexico, and scatter
them there. We found an exquisitely beautiful place, an unihabited
corner of Sonora province on the NW corner of the Sea of Cortez across
from Baja California, 30 miles south of the last town, El Golfo, a
place that appears blank on all maps with no habitation, roads or
landmarks of any kind. We drove along the beach past a dead whale
skeleton, and camped on the deserted point overnight before performing
the last act at sunrise the next morning. We placed the ashes in an
chinese style urn his mother, an amateur potter, had made, his
favorite. After a few words, first by my brother and then by me,
(where I recalled that one of his Atlas rockets had boosted the
Pioneer10 satelite out of the solar system) we poured out the contents of the
urn. With no wind we ended up making a grey sand painting with his
ashes on the white sand dune we had chosen. It was all quite
beautiful and appropriate. My brother marked the point on his hand
held GPS and then we got back in the 4WD and drove north.

There are still two boxes of hardcover Krsna books I want to give
back to them. Maybe some Krsna Grand Poobah would like to buy the
house so that the altar room would not have to be painted over and
remodeled.

At the end of the day I was sitting around with my San Diego SubG
friend, the Mayor of South Park, and he told me his favorite story about the
Krishnoids. He used to live near the Pacific Beach temple where the
Krisna kids would play with the neighbor kids. Whenever McDonalds had
a sale on burgers, he would buy a couple of big bags and give them
away to the veggie Krishna kids, who descended on him like locusts,
grabbing the contraband and gobbling them up well out of the view of their
parents. Good times.