We all have dreams

We had a great turn out yesterday at the River View Protest Ride, with 306 mountain bikers showing up and telling the city that it's not okay to abandon the public process when it doesn't give you the answers you were hoping for.

But the biggest win of the day for me was getting that much closer to my dream job. Life's too short not to do something you love, which is why I've been working tirelessly to parlay all this media attention into my true lifelong passion and dream, starting my own cult.

That's kind of what I was hoping to accomplish with TEAM ROBOT, and we have a pretty sizable readership now, but going negative all the time didn't encourage the sort of pro-cult environment I need. For one thing, TEAM ROBOT readers are "haters," or what I like to refer to as "critical thinkers." Everyone knows that critical thinking has no place in a good cult.

This MTB rally thing on the other hand is more fertile soil for me and my dream job. There's a feel good vibe at the event, a lot of positive energy going on, you're all believing in the same cause and moving in the same direction, I talk a lot and people generally do what I say, and then with a little more work boom didda boom, you're wearing a white linen jump suit, lighting incense sticks, and giving me all your money to ensure your own spiritual enlightenment.

I know it seems like a big jump, but those last two things I touched on are key: first, spiritual enlightenment, and then a close second, me. If there's one thing that protest ride had, it was a whole lot of me. Arguably waaaaaaay too much of me. At first I thought "hey self, for this movement to have lasting power we need to have a variety of strong, articulate voices step forward and take the reins. It can't be all me all the time, or else the momentum will fizzle, or I'll say something stupid and ruin the whole thing, or even worse, people will get to know me and realize that I'm a complete tool."

But then I realized, "wait dude, this is your chance to get that dream job. Go for it."

I also need to have a killer beard if I'm ever going to be a good cult leader. I'm working on it.

Here's the trick: even with all the new age spirituality in the world, if the path to enlightenment doesn't go exclusively through me, then it's just a boring religion that anyone can believe in anywhere, and without that sense of exclusivity based around me there's no way I get a fleet of 40 Rolls Royces or get to sleep with all of the wives of the other cult members.

And if there's no fleet of Rolls Royces, I don't even want to be a cult leader anymore.

So here's the plan. The next step after this protest ride is "riding lessons," but the riding part is sort of secondary. We'll ride for a bit, sure, and I'll coach or whatever, but the main focus will be on all the new-age vaguely eastern spiritualism that's taken Portland by storm. It'll be a spiritual/outdoor/recreational fusion of everything that is Portlandia, and I'll offer up me as the ultimate teacher of this "new path". People in Portland love to think they're the first ones to discover something new. Maybe combine some yoga, shiva, some chi and try to "center people's spirits" or some bullshit, and then when they feel like they're "being transformed" all I have to do is convince them I'm the only route to complete their enlightenment process, and then BOOM.

Then it's just me and my hundreds of willing minions.

So I buy a ranch in Eastern Oregon, construct a weird futuristic commune with way too much glass in the architecture, and everyone gives me all their earthly possessions and I kick it and retire before age 40 with a whole commune full of servants. Maybe a few years down the road when we've really got a head of steam going we go all "Moonraker" and plan a mass global killing scheme to "cleanse" the earth of all the other, unenlightened "dirty" people and then I repopulate the earth.

It's like riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels. If that's not a dream job I don't know what is, so now I'm just working the plan.