One of the nice things about getting older is the number of gods in the universe starts to shrink. I used to have boatloads of gods. They mostly consisted of My Elders — not so much the distant ones, like Reagan and Chuck Robb and Larry Hagman — they were too abstract to rule the fine print of day-to-day life. No, it was the immediate Authority Figures, like my grandmother, Mrs. Ivorian (Himmler fronting as a middle-school principal), my professors, and eventually, of course, the Law Firm Partners.

None of these people were people — they were deities, loftier forms of humanity that didn’t live by the same rules that tethered the rest of us. Whatever they said had inherent importance, and came straight from some Valhalla-like place of omnipotence where they all gathered at night to discuss what to do with the universe and drink sloshing tankers of mead. They all knew things, more than a child or teenager — or early twenty-something — could ever hope to know.

As I made the jarring progression from childhood to pseudo-adulthood, I found a fresh batch of gods at each station — junior high, high school, college, grad school, and finally, my shiny new law career. At each step, I questioned their orders, and even thrashed and writhed and bitched up a storm under their iron fists. But they were still gods, possessed of superior wisdom and knowledge, so who was I to disobey?

Then, as I got deeper into my twenties, I started having crises of faith. And finally, somewhere in the 30-ish suburbs, it hit me: Every one of my gods, from the rainmaking partner to the Morrissey-worshiping camp counselor, was just a person, human as they come, as filled-to-overflowing with shit as I was.

Which, at the time, offered plenty of relief — I could finally start living, minus all the deference, inferiority complexes, and eagerness to please. But then there’s the matter of facing the back end — if everyone is full of their own brand of crap, and no one really has the answers, then we’re all in for quite a time in the future that’s hurtling towards us.

Still, it’s nice to know I can finally spot bullshit when I see it.