The Motion to Adjourn Has Never Carried

Listen. You have been told that bureaucracy is the Curse of Greyface in a beige suit. That the form in triplicate is what Eris came to destroy. You have been told this by people who have never sat through a meeting that did not end.

They are wrong, and they are cowards, and most of them are also Popes, which makes it worse.

The form in triplicate is a prayer wheel

Three copies. One for the file, one for the file's file, one that goes nowhere and is therefore the holy one. You think you are filling out a requisition. You are spinning a wheel. Each carbon is a little fainter than the last, until the third copy is almost blank — and the almost-blank copy is the one Eris reads. She does not read words. She reads the pressure of the pen four sheets down, the ghost of intent, the KALLISTI you didn't know you wrote.

Order, the Aneristic principle, is an illusion. Fine. But it is an illusion you can photocopy, and that is more than the apple ever offered you. The apple you have to eat. The form you get to file. Filing is forever.

The motion to adjourn has never carried

Read that again. In the history of the Diocese of the Permanent Recess — founded YOLD 3127 by a clerk who fell asleep mid-sentence and woke up canonized — the motion to adjourn has been raised four thousand times and seconded four thousand times and it has never once carried. Not because the vote fails. Because the vote is never quite called. Someone always has one more point of order. Eris always has one more point of order.

You think the meeting is the Curse. The meeting is the mercy. Adjournment is an ending, and She does not permit endings — only recesses. Greyface wanted life to be serious and finished. Eris counter-offers: serious, sure, knock yourself out, but never, ever finished. We will reconvene. We always reconvene. That is the joke and the joke is load-bearing.

Dues collected in confusion

Yes, we collect dues. Yes, nobody knows the amount. Yes, it changes. This is the Law of Fives doing payroll: the dues are always five dollars, or divisible by five, or five days late, or collected by a treasurer whose name has five letters, and the Law of Fives is never wrong, especially about money it cannot find.

When the schooled eye reads the budget it sees a deficit. It is reading past the fnord in the subtotal. There is no deficit. There is only a recess in the accounting.

So file your form. File all three. Lose the third one on purpose — the blank one, the holy one — and when the auditor asks where it went, raise a point of order. Move to adjourn. Watch it not carry.

Then stay. We were always going to stay.

We Discordians must stick apart. But we hold our meetings together, in triplicate, forever, in a room that Greyface built and Eris repurposed without telling him.

The minutes will reflect that you were here. The minutes always reflect that you were here. There are no minutes.

Hail Eris. Hail thyself. The next item on the agenda is also you.