"Moon Cult" Gutter
(Even Stranger Currencies. . . . .)
*********************
This is a sequel from a piece entitled: "Strange Currencies"
A lot of water had passed under the bridge sense those strange, lost days of high school with that peculiar troika of Anthony, Mr. Doaker, and myself. While this old kooky professor continued to holler on like a keyed-up Mel Brooks, higher than a kite on medicinal THC about "banks" and the shut-off valve for popular democracy, if not "lasers" as if he was having a conversation with Darth Vader, both Anthony and I had fled into the forsaken jungle of isolation-- two misfits unable to cope in modern society. . . . . like downed pilots in 'Nam as the system "in the world of the living" grew even more slick and bloated and corrupt, and inhospitable perhaps.
Where Anthony was and what happened to Anthony, I did not know. I had not seen him in six years. One day he had picked up and went into total withdrawal from the world. His behavior became more and more erratic until he just flat-out disappeared.
I, on the other hand, was tinkering around and laughing my ass off at the movie, "Ed Wood" (1994).
"Home? I have no home. Hunted. . . . . Despised. . . . ." Bela Lugosi spits from his perch, gripping the sides of his high-backed professor's chair-- "pursued like an animal through the jungle for 20 years, but I will create a race of atomic supermen and TAKE OVER THE VORLD!" [sic].
Lugosi used to be a big-shot before he lost it all through a series of bad business decisions, an insufferable "greatness lost" through the ravages of time, and finally ending up a drug addict shooting himself up with wicked indulgences like a feral animal-- just to keep himself going on movies with a frayed shoe-string budget. The lights weren't turned off on him yet, and he hadn't given up hope like a monocled count wrestling with a rubber octopus at 3 A.M with an invigorated "Let's Shoot This Fucker. . . . ." as the camera rolled.
So it was with my writing. . . . . my website. . . . . building up the confidence to leave "the jungle" someday and hopefully not in a pine box, buried in my cape.
I sought out Anthony all these years later, and there he was. . . . . living at home. Wretched social isolation had left him living without hope and he was very quiet. I tried to rouse his spirits, but he was dead inside-- like a beached, glaze-eyed fish. Whether it was medication or a lack of stimulation, this young man was gone to the world like an alien lost in a world he never knew.
Frankly, it scared the shit out of me. . . . . a alternate haunted house mirror of what I might have been had I utterly given up, or if my life-force had been less or my upbringing less rich.
I kept feeling around for the old friend I knew, but he wasn't there. Eventually he got sort of overwhelmed with this irritation as he slowly paced the kitchen in his socks with his back turned, got angry, and threw me out of the house.
And that was it. . . . .
Another time I talked to Mr. Doaker,
hoping to get a recommendation letter for attending the college of my choice. He was pleased to
hear from me, wondering where I had been all these years. He did not understand
the how and why of my faded presence as we met at the St. Louis Bread Company, a café
with burnished green countertops oozing with the whisk of insincerity. But this was a
crisis of credibility-- as he was too oblivious, too tone-deaf, to
understand the realities on the ground, why I had to bail and the reality of
failed campaigns when tactical mistakes and equipment failures and unable "to
win the hearts & minds" of his peers and loss of morale precluded much of a
favorable outcome and "the struggle" wasn't worth the suffering at any price.
This former teacher gave me the ole' lecture of what I should do with my life, how worthless whatever I had been doing was, and I had to fight back tears behind a placid face of pleasant agreement. I would not allow myself to break down in front of this old mentor, because if I started crying I was afraid that I couldn't stop. All the rhetoric, all the heavy-handed lies, all the grasping greed, how dreams don't come true, how you flee to protect what little bit of your dignity is left before it's ripped from you and one is left with absolutely nothing except ashes.
It made no difference. . . . . they would not accept a 24 year-old drop-out. I was trash to them, scum-froth, worthy of the gutter. My life was fucked, and no one could help me.
So I walked around University City, searching for. . . . . answers? Excitement? Romance? Hope?
So named for the towering spires of Washington University, the area seemed acquiescent with the overeducated ignorance of useless tolerance and docility-- a sort of "come what may" quill-dipped-in-the-shit-pot bookishness that journaled man's concerns, like crust collecting beneath the fingernails as we slouched toward the inevitable. May the stink molder on your bones in the cemetery because that's the only thing left of you after you're gone. Sometimes there can truly be so much "diversity" that people tune out what's going on-- young people wandering around with bicycles and backpacks, more indifferent than happy. There was the public library, and the interesting, quirky books on sociology from the 1970's which concluded that America was on the road to fascism which no one reads. There was the Tivoli movie theater where a revival of "A Clockwork Orange" was showing, a fiftyish bald man with long hair in back standing in line and glaring out at passerbys like a character imported from the grubby end of New York City. There was the outdoor fruit market, small-time farmers stooped over and selling their goods for a pittance. It was the "ca-chunga" of Central American drums and the questing trying to find transcendence in turquoise, poverty, and red mud. However, it would seem elusive and the Central Americans would gladly switch places with the yearning gringo.
Point being, the location was watery and silly enough for "The Church of
$cientology" to move in like a stealthy beast. Up went the stone-carved sign on the front mantel of the building, large like a temple, weighted between the residential, civic area, and main shopping district of University City. I regularly drove past the place when I went down to "The Loop" to buy music, and there the building frowned portentiously like a freakish monument to "better living through science fiction"-- kitsch and rubber alien heads and bad taste-- like a "Star Trek" convention institutionalized into some kind of crazy fad. All I knew was that the founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was a hack science fiction writer from the 1950's who once famously said "if a man really wanted to get rich, he should start his own religion".
-- "Crafty Gremlin"
One day, I ordered a book over the internet, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health" and in the mail it came.
"180,000,000 SOLD!" the cover screamed, with the power of a blasting volcano on front. The back promised the path to total happiness and freedom, the fulfillment of our highest spiritual potential, and out of 500 pages, I waded out of about a quarter of hackneyed, 1950's-era, high-falutin' pseudo-science that didn't sound like anything that ever came out of a standard psychology textbook and what neuroscientists know about the mind. According to them, mental illness did not exist-- no less a fantastic claim.But once I got on their mailing list, they pestered me to take their free personality test. I came in and filled out the answers hopefully and conservatively and their response literally was
"my God, these are the worst results we have ever seen!". They took me into a special room to watch a propaganda film that showed happy, sunny, beautiful people "giving the tour" of the church's significant accomplishments and vast crackpot campuses while those who did not partake "would be shut out into the outer darkness FOREVER".What kind of hard-sell was this?
Then they started out by laying down a regimen of vitamins and vegetables, practically on a leafy plate. And brought in a salesman to sell me more books of incomprehensible gibberish. I did not want leafy vegetables and vitamins and gibberish, I wanted RED MEAT ANSWERS. But on this point, they seemed rather vague-- pushing forth all sorts of release forms, nodding "yes, yes, this will help you" like a team of sinuous Siamese cats, getting me to part with a small fee for one of their introductory "courses" by sad-eyed, frumpy people who looked no less happy or healthy or reasonable than I did, but whose faces danced with the electricity of avoidance.
They had my fill out a questionnaire, with such jarring queries as
"have you ever had a homosexual experience?" and my favorite-- "have you ever fantasized about killing your father?".Who would ever confess to such things, true or not, to total strangers? Much less anything deep that was bothering me to a process so rude, so probing, so inappropriate?
They led me upstairs to "the auditing room" where a porky young man in a coat and a tie, with all the spiritual glow of a mollusk at the bottom of the catfish-shit-filled Mississippi, brought out the E-meter, which I later learned was essentially a crude lie-detector.
He looked down at my questionnaire and realized that I took anti-depressants. In short, they wouldn't "treat me". And brought over another young man, who looked like a Republican operative, to write down an address of a nutritionist who would give me vitamins to wean me off my medication. . . . . and it occurred to me that if I were kicked out in "that no man's land" of neurochemical despair than I would be that much more emotionally-dependent on these shifty characters, who wanted my money.
I left in a daze, clutching the piece of paper.
If it was the whole of established modern medicine against these strange, strange people, I wasn't going to risk it. They called me up the very next day, all cheery voices, like a happy European village of all-natural yogurt-eaters, wondering why I hadn't returned with "a love-bomb" of interest.
"Because I take medication for anxiety and depression".
There was a flutter of shock on the other end of the line. Taking Paxil (-- among other things) was commensurate to being on the level of a heroin junkie, shooting up in a bathroom stall. On the release form, you gave them the right to take you out of a mental hospital if you were involuntarily committed and "treat you with vitamins" as you rocked and moaned and thrashed in a darkened motel room. A woman had died under these circumstances. Another had treated her seriously-impaired son with vitamins and had been stabbed to death in a furious outburst because he hadn't been properly handled.
Truthfully,
what this market-grabbing "Reverend Moon" ideology smacked of was the time when Mr. Doaker made way "for a very special presentation" as he
went off to fight the University City zoning commission, telling his lawyers to
jam up the legal process with his dubious rental properties like a slum-lord. A man who had all the messianic look of a dot.com
start-up owner came in front of the class and asked simple questions about the joys of
camping and the prospective thrill of a wilderness challenge to which the gullible students were supposed
to cheer back an answer in unison. Well, the response could be described as tepid-- like
sacred monkeys sitting around the stone steps of an Indian temple-- their hairy chins somewhat falling down into their chests, waving their tails with typical primate aimlessness
as they were fed by their worshipful handlers. Each time someone responded favorably, the director handed them a rich, scrumptious premium-priced cookie. Or was it a chocolate-chip double fudge muffin?! He brought in a grocery sack full of goods, and it was
UNBELIEVABLY EASY to get full real fast. It was as clear case of B.F. Skinner conditioning, if any, getting the empty-headed pigeons to do what he wanted with a food pellet. Or training circus seals with a fish.
Even we could see it was bullshit.
A former student stood off to the side, in a coat and tie, just like a greeter at the Church of $cientology whose $4000 premium wilderness camp Mr. Doaker was letting him promote with his business partner as a favor and merely leaned against the wall with his hands clasped before him with slickness. Who knows what happens when the best plans of mice and men go to waste and you find yourself with a dead body going, "oh, shit. . . . ."?
Either the monkeys go for it, or they don't. And I didn't. The best weapon against any organization is probably studied indifference as they throw out their hand to no one. One thing though-- those $cientologists never sent me my promised $30 refund. . . . . the check evidently "got lost in the mail".
And here is my way of "getting even":
*******************
http://www.rotten.com/library/religion/scientology/
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/religion/cult/l-ron-hubbard/
In other words,
P.S. Is this a happy and well-adjusted yogurt-eater?
READ MORE @ Wikipedia:
The Tragic Stories of
Click here for "Letter to a Scientologist"
Guess what?
The Church of
$cientology
is now
stood Accused
of Torture, Forced Abortions. . . . . and blackmail. Read about it
here with
a grain of skepticism, but where's there's smoke, there's fire!
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2010 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at