The path to controlling my anxiety continues. A few sessions ago, after listing off a laundry list of my worries, woes and a few anecdotal childhood stories, my therapist (a man of few words who rakes in a small fortune with discreet head-nods and uses 5 of his 15 total uttered words to to say: “well, looks like thats time”) said it sounds like I always assume I’ll be punished if something good happens to me. And I nodded, that yes, of course. He said that my cause and effect mindset seems like I subscribe to magical thinking. At first I scoffed, but then when I really thought about it, I realized that for me it’s more of a really, really intense belief in karmic retribution. Much like The Rhythm, Instant Karma will also get you. And for that I blame my childhood need for salvation and being inundated with stories about being punished.

I was raised in the bible belt - North East Texas. We lived in a dry county, run by Baptists and Pentecostal men and women with giant bouffants, lacy prairie garb and frosted makeup. A town that had MTV taken off the air as it was deemed too scandalous to be allowed in Lamar County. Paris in the 80s and early 90s made the town from Footloose seem pretty cosmopolitan! But, seriously, the town really did snatch MTV away from us in ‘88 or ‘89, around the same time our HS Football team won state - a real underdog tale - and we didn’t get MTV back for another decade - until my senior year of high school. Just in time for The Real World: Boston and Hanson’s “MmmBop”! Side note, a small victory for the #youths, our town wasn’t able to successfully pull BET from the airwaves, and you know those ghouls wouldn’t lay a fucking finger on the country station which was then TNN (the Tennessee Nashville Network) - so there’s a solid chunk of the Gen Xers of Paris, Texas who were reared solely on Rap and Country music. I got one year of “Remote Control” - more than that? I wasn’t able to see Jon Secada’s “Just another day” video when it came out, or describe the sexual tension felt when Eric Nies did white boy tai-bo during the Grind as it aired, or what Liquid TV showed late at night during the school year - BUT! I can fucking tell you EVERY SINGLE Infomercial that aired between 88-98 (I’m still waiting for my mom to buy me that fucking DiDi-7 tube), can recite all the lyrics to John Michael Montgomery’s “Grundy County Auction”, and I have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the videos that ran on BET in the early to late 90s. It feels like a fair trade, especially given that I was able to binge (and I mean BINGE) MTV every summer when I went to visit my Grandparents outside of Seattle. There I drank in the grunge scene like a fresh Frutopia and made notes to take back to my friends (oxblood Mary Jane docs are IN! Seven Mary 3 isn’t as cool as we all think! Yes, everyone is horny for the teen alt boys from Silverchair!). Anyway, I fared ok, but being around that type of region was A LOT and it permeated everything in my town. Everything.

Despite you know, it being illegal, we fucking prayed as a stadium before each football game. We prayed at assemblies. On Sunday’s every fucking restaurant opened at 12pm, just in time for the church lunch rush and closed early so everyone could make it back to the evening service. Even Jesus has to pull doubles on Sundays in the Bible Belt. And for a solid chunk of my childhood Paris was subject to Blue Laws, these would mean that you couldn’t purchase frivolities on the Lords Day (toys- and in non-dry counties, booze). But we were already dry, so ya know, there wasn’t a ton to limit. Look, it wasn’t a bad place to grow up - we had BET. I could tool around the town on my bike in safety. I could track tornadoes on the time and temp channel and chase fireflies between bouts of wall-clouds rolling in…

While my mom and Aunt weren’t religious, everyone in my extended family (and friend circle for that matter) was. My great-grandma, the world’s sourest sour-puss, the woman who could one up Debbie Downer and would never fail to let you know exactly what sort of woe could befall you at any given moment (She famously made a comment when I went to Europe that, if I DID manage to survive the transatlantic flight, to remember that Paw Paw was shot by the Nazis in Italy and hid for weeks in the woods, and that she really didn’t think I had it in me to stay safe. I told her I’d keep an eye out for rogue WW2 Fighters still out there waiting in the woods. Amazingly I made it through Italy without being taken captive by a Mussolini sleeper cell). As a kid, being sick was the WORST punishment because it meant I had to go and stay at her house during the day - a place of actual horrors. Despite it being sticky and hot in NE Texas, she she kept her little wall heater in the living room, inches away from where she’d make my pallet on the floor, cranked on HIGH. So high the fucking blue flames would lick out of the ceramic frame of the thing, so close that you’d have to be careful not to knock your tissue box too close or roll over if you were trying to sleep. And you know, coming from a fairly recent house fire, there was truly nothing more scary to me than sleeping next to an open, untended flame….well, maybe the big spare room was close second. In that room, which was chock full of random stuff - spare furniture, boxes, doll houses from my mom and her cousin’s era - there was also a large wig collection she had housed on those styrofoam heads. And let me tell you, if you were a child who watched Return To Oz, there was something extremely unnerving about a row of heads all lined up for you to accidentally stumble across. But the the worst part of a sick day with her wasn’t the fact she’d force feed you chicken and dumplings when you just wanted a Popsicle for your sore throat, no it was in regards to what she’d let you watch on television. Every child knows that the best, BEST, part of “feeling puny” as she called it, was being allowed to view the magic window of television that aired during school hours - watching people lob hams into shopping carts on ‘Supermarket Sweep’ and win a beautiful new dinette set after killing it on Plinko! And don’t get me started on the cartoons - no seriously don’t, because I wouldn’t fucking know! I know that The Smurfs aired at like 7:30 or 8am and I wasn’t allowed to watch those little rascals when I was there. Why? WITCHCRAFT, BABY! Gargamel was a fucking wizard and magic would NOT fly in her house, let me tell you. And don’t think this moratorium on magic was limited just to little blue Belgians, no way, this also extended to my favorite rerun, “I Dream of Jeanie”. Again, witchcraft. I tried to explain that I just wanted to watch Larry Hagman (even as a child my brand was HORNY). Obviously “Bewitched” was out, I mean, it’s literally in the title. So, I was relegated to watching Channel 2, the Time and Temp/Doppler Radar channel and then, ‘Little House on the Prairie’. Look, I loooooove Pioneer shit. I played Pioneer Girl 24/7 - I even once famously hung bacon strips on a clothes line while attempting to make jerky and instead attracted every fucking grackle in greater NE Texas - it was terrifying. I blame this on being a latch-key kid and left to my own, very questionable devices, for the majority of my childhood. Anyway, what I’m saying is, it’s not that I don’t like pioneer stuff, its that I was being force-fed fucking Half-Pint along with my dumplins cause it was M O R A L and I just wanted to watch witchy shit. She also let me watch Judge Wopner and The Peoples Court (because this it was real life). Cool.

Anyway, as you can guess, Toni, her name was Rose Lee but my mom decided to call her Toni when she was a baby and it stuck and then when I got older I would jokingly call her Toni Kitaen, which no one else would laugh because they sucked, was a very, very religious lady. The majority of my family are varying degrees of Pentecostal, but Toni was the type of Pentecostal that wore vaguely “sister-wifey” dresses - lots of florals and doilies connected to it, and then she had her hair ALWAYS set like she was Barbara Stanwyck on “A Big Valley”. While the rest of my family attended more “normal” churches, she went to one that was real intense with revivals - the works! If you told me she had handled some snakes on occasion, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. The church she attended happened to be Pastored by “Cousin Ralph”. Ralph was…a lot. He and his wife fancied themselves the small town Pentecostal Jim and Tammy Faye. Only his wife looked like fucking Piper Laurie from Carrie. Ralph had his sermons broadcast on the Time and Temp channel and if you were lucky enough, some Sunday’s you’d catch him “healing” people. This consisted of him praying at someone, squinting his eyes real tight and then screaming in a very East Texas accent, “YOU ARE HEALING! YOU ARE HEALED” while he whacked them on the fucking forehead with the heel of his palm, throwing them backwards into the waiting arms of the ushers. I LOVED IT!!!! It was so wild and dramatic! Ralph was also a grade-A creep with the soft hands of a ghoul and at my Grandmothers funeral a few years back, he rounded the receiving line in front of my grandmas open casket (and the giant spray of flowers my celebrity boss had sent and caused me to break into a fit of laughter), and when he got to me, he grabbed my hand with his creepy, creepy old man claw and said very loudly, “Why Morgan. Everyone thought you were dead”. I laughed thinking he was joking since I don’t go home often, but no, he was fucking serious. And there was a very, very long pause where I realized most people there didn’t recognize me and maybe also thought I was dead? So I said, “well, Ralph how did you think I died???” and he just shrugged his shoulders and hobbled away.

But as child in the bible belt, even without my mom taking me, I ended up going to church most Sunday mornings. This was because if you spent the night with someone on a Saturday, that meant you better be prepared for Sunday School AND church the next morning. You were basically captive till about 1pm, depending on if the family went to dinner (lunch in East Texas) after or not. I think my friends parents viewed me as a little lost lamb, so I got invited to spend the night A LOT. Because of this, I got a sampling of East Texas churches. I knew when the majority of services started and ended, which ones pushed past the hour and a half mark, etc. The breakdown was that most of my friends went to either First Baptist or First United Methodist. I preferred the latter for multiple reasons. For one, the sanctuary is really lovely - it has a big stained glass dome that you could stare up at for the duration of the service and get lost in - and if you really tried, you could pretend that the heavens were lovingly looking down on you. They were also way more lax, less damning and the Sunday school classes were much less rigid. More felt stories about the friendly beasts and Noah’s Ark. If you went to the Baptist church, you better come ready ‘cause those bitches didn’t care if you were visiting or not, they’d put you on the spot and force you to try and answer questions about Zacchaeus and Lot and his dumb wife and I didn’t like not knowing the answer and looking like the heathen I was. So after being caught off guard a few times by being forced to participate in “Bible races” (where you see who can flip to the chapters of the bible the quickest), and getting the sinking sensation that I was being shamed, I asked my mom for a bible and taught myself all the tricks so I could be the fastest to Judges. I’ve been called a tad stubborn before, don’t worry. Anyway, because I was doing so much church hopping and kept getting told by old white men who smelled like Shower to Shower baby powder that if I, a fucking CHILD, wasn’t saved by their church that I’d go to Hell, something started to brew in my young, anxious noggin’. See, I’m a problem solver by nature - I always, always have contingency plans on deck. I like to try and find control in this buck-ass wild world! Sitting there Sunday after Sunday I was hearing the same shit from every Pastor, maybe some versions were less aggressive, but they all came down to one thing: you needed to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your savior OR ELSE. And thats when I formulated my plan. I would just shop around for salvation. When I tell you I went to A LOT of churches, I mean it - had there been a Synagogue or Mosque in Paris, I would’ve gone there too. She is openminded, fam. Anyway, the point is, my plan was simple - I’d get saved by all the big denominations, the ones I felt had more clout with the fella upstairs. This meant I accepted the Lord as my savior many, many, many times over, in many, many different sanctuaries. This also also resulted in me deciding to get baptized in a few different churches…just to be safe. I got sprinkled twice and then I really decided to secure my place at the pearly gates by going to a fire and brimstone evangelical Baptist church in 7th grade. That one wasn’t my ideal church, but I liked that if anything it was more interesting than First Baptist. I figured if I sealed the deal there, getting full-blown submerged in a gross hot tub at the front of the church, I should pretty well be locked into the afterlife. I realize this sounds like I was trying to trick God….and I was. I fully thought seeing my name on multiple church ledgers would distract him/her from the fact that no matter how hard I tried or prayed I didn’t feel anything. This plan really shouldn’t be surprising as it came from the same genius that, after sneaking up to watch tv in the middle of the night, caught a viewing of “Helter Skelter” and was so scared that I became convinced that Hippies were going to break in to murder me in the dark of the night. I thought that hippie murders happened because people didn’t subscribe to the “hippie lifestyle”….so, the solution was that I would get up in the middle of the night each night and sleep on the hardwood floor in the living room, waiting for them to arrive. Then each morning I’d sneak back into my room - living to see another day. My thought process was, if I could let them see how bohemian I was (sleeping on the floor and all), then I could explain that it wasn’t ME who wanted to live a square life with “the man”, it was due to my mom. So maybe they’d let me go and kill my mom instead? Look, there’s a survival instinct in us Clines and I’m not, NOT proud of our ability to save our own hide. We wanna live baby and I’ll throw my own mom under the bus if that means I escape being hippie murdered. So yeah, I formulated a plan to trick the creator of the Universe, and I still think it’s a pretty solid afterlife work-around!

So this church, ugh. The real issue was, that no matter how much they tried, Hell never seemed all that scary. Look, I didn’t want to risk going to Hell, but all and all…I just don’t think they leaned into the overall fearful aesthetic. If they really wanted to scare the shit out of people, why not make your church more Goth- slap some paintings of Satan flaying men alive, while like, fallen angels eat un-saved babies or some shit? I’m just spit-ballin. But fuck, this place was lame. It was dark and dreary, with the lowest ceilings I’ve ever seen in a building, but it wasn’t creeeeeeeepy or imposing. It was just an ugly building with bad lighting, dark red carpet and wood paneling. And while my entire town was conservative, pretty much everyone agreed that we could all enjoy the wholesome Christian pop stylings of Michael W Smith (“Place in this World” is an absolute BANGER), and even Amy Grant, the harlot, but not these folks. Nope! They enjoyed the fun musical stylings of weird christian siblings singing in three part harmony about salvation. I once found myself having to ask my mom to drop me off at “Living Water Christian Bookstore” in order to procure a cassette single of the lamest song of all time: “You’re the Only Jesus” so that I could sing a duet in front of the stuffy, gross congregation. As I mentioned before, I’m pretty stubborn, but good God, there’s nothing like watching a bunch of tweens hanging out and talking about the Rapture while wearing t-shirts tucked into their Umbros that had a drawing of Jesus’ bloody hand with a big-ass nail in it and the words “His Pain. Your Gain” emblazoned on the back to make you second guess your eternal grift.

I know that a big reason that I was drawn to this church was because I spent A LOT of my free-time watching channel 14, TBN - The Christian Channel. Specifically the televangelists Pat and Jan Crouch. She had lavender hair and made Tammy Faye look like an Upper East Side Socialite. Her style could best be described as “Jon Benet meets a pekinese”. What started out as a fascination and a gag, flipping to the channel to piss off my mom, laughing at the shows and the preachers asking for money, it didn’t take long to become a full-blown obsession. I didn’t buy anything these creeps were saying, but I LOOOOOOOOOVED the pageantry!! Oh the spectacle and the begging for tithes! What glorious performance art! So when I stumbled into this specific evangelical church one Sunday after spending the night at a friends house, and the preacher started condemning everyone to Hell - talking about all the suffering and perils that befall you for eternity if you stumble off the path - I was IN!!!! Again, yes it seemed pretty lame, but as far as the spectacle goes, it was fairly elevated for Paris, and the only other alternative for real performative shit was cousin Ralph’s church, but even I have limits.

But I really didn’t realize exactly how lame it really was - it was the kind of lame that was exhausting because it was full of…simple people. Now, I’m not saying I’m some sort of genius, I’m obviously not by any means, but I am saying that if a 12 year old girl is able to manipulate an entire youth group (leaders included) to do her bidding, something is terribly lacking with the congregation to say the least. And when I say I manipulated and bent them to my will, I mean it. Truly it started out kinda innocently. Boredom is a helluva thing, and I needed to bide some time - you know clock in juuuuuuust enough time to get saved and let the ink dry before I skeedaddled. So, because I was bored, I started testing the waters to see that they’d believe. And because they weren’t real imaginative, so I could make up these wild backstories about how I came to find Jesus and watch them wide-eyed. I’d created dark tales about my family in the Pacific Northwest. I created an alter-ego that was sweet on the outside, but had a bit of an edge about her - just enough to make people think I was one slip away from a catastrophic fall from grace. I made a point to remind people that I came from a broken home (at the time that was practically unheard of in my friend group), which meant I was being reared by a - gasp! - SINGLE WOMAN???? WHERE WAS MY FATHER FIGURE? I’d smirk and say in the sky and they’d all nod and I felt the power in that lie….the power in realizing my energy could have a real deal effect on these backwoods lemmings.

The first time I decided to manipulate in earnest started with a crush - again, I was like 12….but there was a guy who must’ve been 16 because he drove this beat-up truck and he sorta followed me around. Which looking back is real problematic. He sorta looked like a blond Luke Perry from 8 Seconds and that was enough for this tween. Anywho, one day I told him I wanted to go to the movies but didn’t have anyone to take me (being an only child of divorce and all) . He of course agreed to pick me up and take me (where was my mother and why did she allow this? WHO KNOWS!). This was like very, very early October 1992, so I pretended I wanted to see The Mighty Ducks, which had just come out and I had already seen, but I knew it would work for my plan. It wasn’t until we were at the ticket booth that my real motivation came out - I pushed in front of him and told the ticket fella that we wanted two tickets to “Last of the Mohicans” (I had been dying to see it and was turned away the week before because it was PG-13 and I was but a small impressionable child) and when the employee started to say no, I wasn’t old enough duh, I pointed at the guy I had conned into taking me there as my escort and said he was my brother who specifically brought me with my parents consent because it “was a historical movie”. And that dumb god-fearing motherfucker nodded, and then I got to go in and get super horny over Daniel Day Lewis and mouth along when he screamed, “No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you!”, which I had obsessed over from the trailer. Anyway, he never called me out about the lie and I knew right then and there that he was under my diabolical control. I was fucking high on my power!!

I upped the ante pretty hard-core not a week later. I’ve always taken in strays and injured animals, but around that time I was REALLY REALLY good at finding creatures that needed rescuing. The nature lady, the woman who helped injured wild animals, knew our land-line number and knew that 90% of the time it was just me calling her, unsupervised, to tell her I had another wounded squirrel or bird I needed to bring her asap! Then I’d ride my bike with a shoebox in the basket housing whatever poor soul I had managed to scoop out of the middle of the road. I was a feral menace. So, given my history, it’s no real surprise that when I saw two stray puppies milling about outside of the skating rink one night, I went and bought hotdogs from the concession stand and made them give me rope (??) so that I could tie them up and keep them safe until my mom picked me up from the rink. And when she did, I let her know that I had two dogs I was bringing home so that she could take them to the no-kill shelter on Monday. By that point I’m pretty sure I had drained every ounce of energy out of every member of my family, so I was mostly met with a shrug and allowed to continue with my schemes.

Well, Monday rolled around and I happened to have the day off of school, some sort of teacher work day, but because my mom taught a different school district, she had to work. So, on her way into work she tried to drop the dogs off at the no-kill shelter but they were full, and extremely frustrated with the situation and now running late from work, and again, very much over me and my bullshit, she took the dogs to the pound and went on with her day. That was the wrong fucking decision, let me tell you. Because, l ate a pop tart and then hopped on my bike and road out to the no-kill shelter to play with the dogs. It wasn’t the first time we had brought them dogs I had found off the street, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but they were used to me rolling up, and so when I arrived the lady came out explained what had happened. That they were full and so my mom had to take the dogs to the pound, where they normally just killed them after a day by the way, and so I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. I rode back home in a lather, called the pound, figured out the steps needed to get the dogs back (I think it was something like $35 dollars per dog and then I needed my guardian with me) and I started my mission. The first step was the money. That was easy. I rode my bike to all my friends houses, collecting spare money, change, allowances, whatever we could find, and then pooled that with the money I went and grifted from my grandma, lying and saying my mom had left me without lunch on my day off from school and boy I could really use some Braums! She bought it, palmed me the cash, and then it came time for the biggest challenge. I needed someone to be my guardian. I still don’t truly know how I pulled off the next step in my plan, but I’m equal parts proud and terrified over the power I wielded as a tween. Anyway, without hesitation I rode to my youth ministers home and somehow convinced his wife to a) drive me to the pound which was out on the business loop and b) LIE AND SAY SHE WAS MY MOTHER SO I COULD TAKE THE DOGS HOME and then c) drive me and the dogs back to my house. I guess, now is a good time to mention that I’m not convinced I’m a little bit evil. See, remember great-grandma Toni? Well HER mom was a woman they called Big Momma (#South) and she was from Appalachia and after some digging into wild stories about her (she saved a mule by laying hands on it and whispering scripture after it ran through a barbed-wire fence and was bleeding out/ could breath into the mouthes of babies with the croup and breathing issues and they’d be cured), we became convinced she was what they called an Appalachian Mountain Witch. Now, I’m not saying thats true or not, but I am saying every photo I have of myself as a child looks like I'm the main character from “Fire Starter”. So, there might be some dark manipulation in me, is all. Anyway, the pastors wife followed my plan and I was able to get the dogs home without any issues. None. She didn’t tell me it was wrong to lie. She didn’t tell me I was being deceptive or misbehaving. Nope! She got her car, lied and said she was mom and I was able to pay and leave with the pups! Sure the fun reveal of me in the bathroom giving the dogs a flea bath when my mom came home was really something, but I never faced any consequences from anyone at the church. At all.

My tenure at said church ended not too long after that - once you realize you can manipulate that many people, it sorta looses its luster. Oh, also, I was the passenger in an accident where an underage driver flipped the car while we were out on some land for a church hayride. I realized, as I was being flung out of the window on the second or third rotation while Vince Gill was crooning on the radio, that these were not the people I wanted to associate with, crisis or not. I had my salvation, what more did I need? Certainly not to hang with a bunch of bumpkins who were as bad at driving as they were at being cool. I didn’t want creepy Christian music. I wanted Grunge. So I left, shifted back to the Methodists and their lighter version of religion. I had no need to use my powers for darkness, instead I lusted over the older boys who would humor us and take us for Dr Peppers at Taco Delite after youth group, all while blasting White Zombie’s “Thunderkiss 65”. I never felt cooler. Plus I turned 13 that Fall - I didn’t need some farm boy with an Ichthus and Fear Not! stickers on his truck windows to take me to see Daniel Day Lewis chase waterfalls in a loin cloth, I could do that on my own now, thank you very much!

It wasn’t the end of my religious experimenting, not by far. High School saw me in Bible Club and deeply into Young Life. I secretly loved the Aussie Christian Band “The Newsboys”. Hillsong wishes they wrote, “Take Me To Your Leader” . I worked at Young Life Camps. I went to church well into my late 20s. I fasted during Lent. I just wasn’t chasing salvation anymore. I had locked that shit down long ago. But despite my best intentions and wishes, I never felt “it”. I was always an observer, not an ardent believer. I could worship the stained glass and daydream about the idea of an powerful force, but I never felt the sweet embrace of the Lord or the desire to put my hands into the air and say things like, “This convicts me” or some shit, no matter how hard I tried or wanted to believe. Some people might think it’s because I never really allowed myself to give into the feelings, always held back truly letting the holy trinity into my heart. Nah. Honestly, I think there is a much more obvious and realistic answer. I’m pretty sure I’m either a Witch or Witch-Adjacent. Maybe that shit from Big Momma skipped a few generations? Laid dormant until I came into the world that rainy November, and the energy was like, ah yes, this kid seems like the perfect vessel! Only instead of using my powers for good - whispering scripture into the ear of a dying beast only to have the creature’s bleeding stop and it make a miraculous recovery - I used it to see fucking Last of the Mohicans and trick the Lamar County Pound. I guess we all make choices. I think God would understand.