outandabout

Happy Birthday, Radar!

are we stuck???

There I was, on the bus, crazy as a loon, on my way to Rochester. When the bus got to Oklahoma City, I got off the bus. What do you expect a crazy person to do? I carried a bag of stuff and a guitar. I was walking around and around the bus station babbling incoherantly. At one point a guy who worked at the bus depot took me downstairs to a supply closet, said a bunch of weird things to me that only God or the Devil would know, then turned off the lights and jacked off. It could have been rape. Thank God I was ok. Then he let me out. Soon after that, the police arrived and put me in the back seat of their car, behind that cage thing. They went through my wallet, then took me to the city jail. I was escorted to a cell and there I stayed for three days. I had visits from Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. I didn't sleep. I scratched messages into the wall through the paint. One of the wardens was mean and the other one was nice. I asked the nice one "Are you 'Big Nurse?'" And she said yes. She let me bum a cigarette. I asked her when it was night and when it was day and she said, "When you wake up it's day and when you go to sleep it's night." "Big Nurse" went through my wallet and found the address of my parents in Del Mar and called my dad to let them know that I was in a jail in OK City. She came to my cell and told me "Your father is coming to get you." My dad showed up and took me back to CA on a plane and straight to a shrink who gave me a very large dose of Thorazine, not a very fun drug, but it did the trick and I fell asleep on the living room sofa, the first sleep I'd had in days. My dad called Dr Wierwille and asked him to give me a call. Instead, somebody else did, don't remember who, Weingarner maybe. He was the WOW coordinator I think. To this day, my Dad remembers that, that he asked Dr W to call me but he didn't. So, I came down from my episode and then went into the depressed stage, sleeping until noon, feeling totally embarrassed and ashamed and like a failure for failing in the WOW field in the worst way, wondering what to do with my life. I hooked up with the San Diego believers. I went with my brother to Dxxx and Koxx Gxxxs twig. David was great, loving and warm. It was just a nice little twig. Eventually I moved out into an apartment near downtown, (it was cheap then) near the airport and within walking distance to the twig. I could hear the planes going overhead on a regular basis. I was taking a course to be a medical secretary. Then I moved in with a married couple in the twig and got a job making beads for a potter. I know, that doesn't make a lot of sense but that's what happened. Then I went into Fellow Laborers. By this time it was January, 1976. I was living San Leandro in an apartment over the CA headquarters. Txx Bixhop was running the program, and I think he was the limb leader at the time. I was really gung-ho about the whole thing, doing the program all the way. We ran, and I was really into that, since I'd never been very athletic, but running wasn't competitive, and you could work your way up in fitness. We worked part time to bring in money for the family fund. I had house cleaning jobs. One month, the coordinator said I brought in the most money out of everyone. Seeing as finding work and making money was never something I seemed to do well at, I was proud of that. Our assignment, after training was over, was Visalia, CA. I was with Reggie Nxe and Jim. Our assignment was for 6 months. We didn't have much money to find a place to live and get started. Eventually we found an apartment where the manager gave us a break and let us move in without the usual first/last deposit stuff. I found a job in a fabric shop. I kept up with the running. That was the summer Joyful Noise came out with that album, "America Awake" or "Wake up America" or whatever it was. We played it a lot. One day I got up and decided I was going to witness to as many people as I could and went out and talked to about 20 people. We had fellowship almost every night and several people came and went. I met this guy named Tony that I got attracted to. Unfortunately, Tony stole our family fund out of the hallway closet later on. I took time off from the fabric store job to go to a TWI camp and when I came back I was fired. Then I found a job as a short order cook in a restaurant. Well, our assignment ended and I had decided to go WOW again. Give it another try. I took the bus back to my parents' house in Del Mar. My brother and I were both going out WOW that year. Before leaving for ROA, we took a little road trip with our parents and my youngest brother in their motor home. I wasn't afraid this time and I felt at peace. Our parents took us to the LA airport and we got on a plane and went to the Rock and WOW training.

So I got born again that weekend, if I wasn't already. (Maybe in some Bible class I took in elementary school that my mother let me take. I remember how I had to walk back and almost got lost....very strange) I decided the Bible was the truth and that I would sign up for the class. And if the Bible was true, all the other stuff wasn't. It was a real turning point spiritually, to put it mildly. I won't even go into a lot of things that happened spiritually during my "transition" from darkness to light. Let's just say that the darker forces didn't want to let go. But I had understood the words of Jesus Christ when he said "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by me." And the Bible makes it very clear about what God thinks of the things that I previously involved in. Very clear. You cannot spiritually mix oil and water. Funny thing, though, how all the spiritual things I was into before could be mooshed together in my head with little contradiction, but once I got to Jesus, it had to be him and nothing else. On the trips I took up to HQ - and at the BOW WOW in W. Va - the spiritual atmosphere I felt, the spiritual presence, was a different spirit than the ones I had been messing with. I felt the difference, I sensed the difference. I saw the difference in peoples' eyes, and their countenance. And that's why to this day I believe there's a God and a Devil. Did I say that already? So I signed up for the class and continued to go to twig. I was living in a house with other college students, although I had graduated. I was hanging around Yellow Springs because I had been in an encounter group that met 3 times a week and I had committed myself to it for a year - It was a program. We'd sit around and "confront" one another and yell and fight and learn to express ourselves so we could become more "together." Yeah, I had been into that, too. So, just as I was about to take PFAL, this encounter group thing was ending. I had made plans to move in with a female friend I had just gotten to know, but then she got tight with one of the encounter guys, and decided to live with him. The guy told me in so many workds to get lost and he didn't want me moving in with them because the somehow the "vibes" weren't right. Uh, yeah. My vibes had changed. SO - there was a class coming up in Columbus. I packed up my stuff and took off to take the class there and stay with 3 female Fellow Laborers in their apartment. Two of them went on to marry clergy, be amongst those of the upper echelon, so to speak. I took PFAL at the downtown YMCA in Columbus. Txm Jenkxxson ran it. One of the things he said to us was, "And for some of you, this is the last stop." I studied my collaterals at night. I had already spoken in tongues before the end of session 12, because at one time, at HQ, I was sitting in the back of a car, and a police car came up for some reason, and a guy in the car I was in said, "I suggest you all speak in tongues right now." So I did, to myself. After the class was over, I was hanging around the Fellow Laborers' apartment until they kicked me out. I had some money so I found an attic apartment down the street and moved in. I looked all over Columbus for a job but couldn't find anything even though I was trying to apply my newfound Law of Believing. Eventually, I moved back to Rochester. Packed up all my stuff and went back to my home town to live at my parents' house. I found the fellowship there and started going to twig in Rochester. I witnessed to my best friend, Wendy, and she took The Class. I was praying for where to go next when, on a snowy day at a bus stop, I saw Pxxl LeBrxn, who told me that his upstairs apartment over his grandparents place was available, since he was moving into a way home. So Wendy and I moved in and I got a job in the kitchen of a nursing home down the street that another believer had just quit. I was working with all these Polish women who would yell at me all the time until they got used to me and decided I was ok. During one of my first days on the job, I accidentally stabbed myself with a fork in my right hand while I was sorting silverware, receiving a deep gash near my thumb. The scar is still there. If I look at it, it always reminds me of those Polish women yelling at me, and of the trip we took on a bus to Rye, NY to see Dr. W in some church and how my hand was bandaged up at the time. So, we had twig at our apartment. It was the "early day." It was around 1973. We all were in love with the Word, and it wasn't unusual to have someone minister to you, or pray for you and have it be dead on. I loved to have someone minister to me just so I could hear what God had to say to me personally. Donnie Fugit came by one time. Our apartment was sparse but we didn't really think much of that. After all I had been a hippie and I still didn't care much about decor. So Donnie came by to teach and the chair he sat on collapsed, everybody laughed. It was a good teaching, though. Then I decided that summer to go to a Family Camp near Rye, NY for PFAL and Renewed Mind. I fell madly in love with Jxm Stxxz. I had this tendency to just fall for people at the drop of a hat. It wasn't returned with the same intensity. During the camp, one of the believers came up to me to tell me that Donald, one of our twig members, had drowned in the river when he and two other believers had gone swimming. I was in total shock. Dr W dropped in halfway through the camp. He was sitting there in a chair on the grass by himself and I went up to him and asked if I could talk. And I bummed a cigarette from him. He didn't reprove me or anything, just smiled at me and gave me one. I asked him about going WOW, and he said it was a great thing to do but not for everybody. It was up to me. Then I told him about Donald drowning and he seemed very upset. I also told him, during the course of the conversation, that the Rochester branch leaders had left the area earlier than planned at the end of their assignment as branch leaders. He was even more upset, not blowing his stack or anything, but I could see his distress. He called Howard over and said something to him about 'do this or that' but don't recall exactly what. I went home and wrote Jxx of my feelings and he wrote me back a very nice letter. I had signed up to go WOW and had filled out the application, but I had second thoughts. So I told my twig leader, Dan Somebody who went into the 6th corps, that I didn't think I wanted to go WOW after all, but he talked me back into it, and I walked out the front door of our apartment to the mailbox and dropped the application in. I really didn't want to go WOW that much, though. But I didn't want to admit it to myself or anybody else.because then it meant I didn't want to "Go and Grow." I was afraid to uproot myself all over again and go off into the UNKNOWN. And if I was afraid to go, I couldn't admit that to myself because to fear anything was unacceptable and weak. My parents were uprooting as well. My Dad took a new job at UC San Diego (he was a professor and research scientist) and they were moving to San Diego. So they sold the house and packed up and gave me their new address, which I put in my wallet. Time to go to ROA and WOW training. I vaguely remember that I was riding with Linda Bxxxwell and maybe Jimmy Balsxxo and the car broke down. I remember being in some service place but how or if it got fixed I do not recall. But somehow we made it to ROA. By the time WOW training came, I was very high. It was ROA 74, at Lima or Sydney, can't remember which one. I was getting higher and higher and then off into la la land. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would be in the WOW branch with "Barq Lilly". Hers was one of the last branches to be called and, there ya go, my name was called among them. So the next day we were all getting ready to go to Amarillo, TX. While we we all getting to ready to leave, my stomach was in knots, and I kept repeating to myself a scripture ("My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth, give I unto you.") but I still felt the fear. The WOW branch took off in seven cars for the trip to Amarillo. I wasn't driving because I didn't have a license anymore, because I'd lost the one I got when I was 18 and didn't get another one. (not until I was 28) I was going off into a psychotic episode (because I'm bipolar but I wasn't diagnosed at the time). I had had episodes before that went undiagnosed and untreated but since I was in the Word now, my mind was healed, right? So I bacame a total lunatic and by the time we got to Amarillo, Barq took me to the bus depot, told me the guy behind the counter "was my mother" and put me on a bus to Rochester, telling me there would be people to meet me there. Except, my parents were in Del Mar, CA. In my confusion, I thought they were in Rochester, so off I went on a bus to Rochester. I must now relinquish the computer to my child and I will return eventually.

Ok so if I was never born again, during that weekend I accepted Jesus Christ and believed he got up from the dead. There goes the garage door. Someone's home. probably hubby.

Ok, so I went to twig one day and it was in a little chapel in town. I got a little high off of it so I figured there must be something to it. Our little twig had 4 people in it. Steve, Michael (both college WOWs), Cammie and me. We sat on the floor, sang songs, and had a teaching. We were in Yellow Springs, Ohio, not that far from New Knoxville. I went there to HQ a few times with Steve. We sat under the apple trees some of the times. I met Donnie Fugit and I had a crush on him. One time I was standing in the BRC and Dr Weirwille walked in and saw me. He didn't say anything and neither did I. This was all around 1973. Steve invited me to a weekend in West Virginia called a "BOW WOW." I could still go anyway even though I wasn't a WOW. I slept in an a tent or somewhere with the women and when I woke up in the morning, what I remember is, I felt this spiritual presence, this peace, this spiritual something like I hadn't felt before. I woke up and the woman in the cot next to me was braiding her hair, and this total blanket of spiritual peace was envelopping the whole area. I felt it. Now, I had been on both sides at this point spiritually and I knew the difference. I've seen both sides and to this day I know there's a God and and a Devil because I delved into both. Ok, here goes the dog again. Now he's downstairs and wants to get out. geese

scotch and cigs LOL me too

There I was. Sitting on the floor outside the cafeteria of a college campus waiting to apply for a job there. Next to me sat a young man named Steve and we began talking. Steve told me about a fellowship that he ran around campus and during the conversation I told him I might show up sometime. To make a long story short, I eventually did show up a few months later, after bumping into Steve over and over and Steve asking me again and again, and Steve coincidentally moving in next door of all things. I had been on a spiritual quest for years. I grew up in a home with an atheist scientist father and a mother who was probably Christian but one would never know. I have yet to know if I will see her at the Return. When I was 20, before I got witnessed to, I had met a guy in my dorm who was into Yoga and I became entranced with the possibility that there was more to life than the physical realm. After all, I had lived the Existential despair for years of experiencing life as absurd, and then later finding that a group of philosophers had defined it already. Starting with the Yoga guy, I eventually went on to: Astrology (I studied it and got my chart drawn up), The I Ching, and Zen Buddhism. I would go to visit the local medium. I took a Tarot Card class, and did Transcendental Meditation for two year, faithfully meditating my two sessions day. One day I even put on a sari and chanted with some Hare Krishnas in the Student Union. Dog is barking to get out of his crate. To be continued but don't know when.

Hey, Belle I liked you story. Thanks for writing it.

Erin Brokavich Julia Roberts Pretty Woman

One time at Corps Wk or ROA, I was talking to a limb leader's wife I knew, and casually mentioned that I would like to go back to San Diego to live someday. She looked at me with an all-knowing wise smirk and said, "It's best that we make "SPIRITUAL DECISIONS" Ok, CXXXX SXXD, you knew in a 2 minute conversation what I should do with MY LIFE?? You and everybody else, I guess, certainly not ME. Why should I, a mere corps grad peon with no REAL place in the heirarchy, KNOW where to live??? Or even have the gall to make a DECISION about such a thing? I ended up in San Diego and stayed there anyway, but that was because they kicked me of Corps Week in 1982 and I had nowhere else to go but that's another story I'll tell sometime. Anway, any time some one mentions "spiritual decision" that's what I always remember. Her face and her saying that. Know what that did to me? Gave me nowhere to go except where TWI told me, otherwise it wasn't a "spiritual decision" if I simply lived where I wanted to. You have to live where you LEAST want to live, that's "spiritual." And if you live where you're happy to live, well that must be wrong.

:D--> You were probably happy but didn't know it. :D-->

They actually did. It was called twig coordinators' meetings. The little Nazi twig coordinators would report to the head Nazis about who said what and to who and who did or didn't do what. They sat around and talked about people. I know, because I would say things to my room-mates, one of whom was a TC and next thing I knew my BL is confronting me about the EVIL THINGS I said. (which in the real world that normal people live in wouldn't even be thought twice about) One time I had a date with a guy. Well, he invites this other chick to go with us. So I tell my room-mate after this "date" that I thought it was kind of dumb for this guy to invite this other chick when we were supposed to be on a "date." Next thing I know, my BL is confronting me because HOW DARE I say such a thing? Like it was so selfish and unspiritual of me. And that always led into his litany about how I was "poisoning the branch." It was none of his damn business, now that I think of it.

I find that quite ironic. They specialized in melting faces.

Exie, I'll let you know when Tootsie shows back up.

mstar, I love the one about the dog taking a leak! ha!

TWI had people who loved God, were dedicated to serving God all their lives, willing to accept training to be their best to serve God and God's people... and what did the top honchos do? Used them Abused them Kicked them out Yeah, real smart, TWI, real smart

Yes, a lie is intentional. The liar knows the truth but deliberately states an untruth. It's the deliberate intent that makes it a lie. People may speak untruths but they could be misinformed which means it's not a lie. It's very simple but in TWI it sure got twisted. My branch leader told me I was a liar because I said I wanted to go WOW for my next assignment and then later I changed my mind. That made me a liar according to him.

I took all their crap, but I remember my brain still worked and I would think my own thoughts but didn't believe my own thoughts. Now that I look back on it, I realize my own "retorts" in my head were perfectly justifiable and reasonable reactions. Wish I'd said them outloud but didn't, due to my false belief that the reprover must know more than me, was more spiritual, etc etc. An example comes to mind: This 6th corps woman I was a waittress with was reproving me (for like the zillionth time?) and during the reproof she said, "You should stand up for yourself more when you're reproved." And I'm thinking, "Yeah, but then you'd say I'm not meek." It was like those Mad Magazine things where the person responds with one thing and there's another bubble with the smart-foot thing they really want to say.

Notting Hill Julia Roberts Steel Magnolias

Anchorman Will Ferrill Elf

Oh well, he liked her better all along....anyway. He married Diana out of political expediency. Now he's free and he's old and he may never be king anyway. So why not be with the one he liked all along. Not that I care that much. I'm not very surprised, though.

A Fish Called Wanda Jaimie Lee Curtis Freaky Friday

oh yeah, Grand Canyon.

This is turning into animal stories. Same friend, along with her two daughters, with the turtle once had some guinea pigs. One was a black one named Anne. Anne disappeared one day and they thought she was gone for good. Anne was found later in the back of the cupboard under the sink. When she came out she was really skinny! Anne ate and ate and ate and became a very fat little guinea pig.