Thursday, August 28, 2008
Seattle bound!
Despite the blahs, which have abated somewhat for the moment, and being too broke for travel, Astrid and I are off to the great Northwest today. We'll be visiting friends in Seattle and attending the wedding of my dear erstwhile lover, Callie, who lives with her six year old daughter and partner in a tiny town on the Olympic Peninsula. Some of you read about my last visit with Callie way back when in the old blog days. I'm excited to meet her love, whose thoughtfully powerful musings can be found here. Funny that jacket uses "Callie's" real name, so there goes the mystery of my fool-proof pseudononymous system! Anyway, yay!
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Blahs
Feeling inexplicably morose right now. The first couple weeks after graduation were relaxing and wonderful, and now I'm settling into a bit of a malaise, probably owing mostly to being unemployed and having only shitty bookkeeping work to look forward to as I continue on at the clinic two days a week. I will get a lot out of working at the clinic for another year, but this decision to stay on was a really stupid thing to do in terms of finances. It leaves me with bookkeeping as the only way to make enough money part-time to live on. If I had found a full-time mental health internship, I could have been accumulating clinical hours while getting paid, but I just didn't have my shit together enough, amid the massive chaos of my school tanking, to procure myself a full-time gig. Now I'm kind of stuck having made this committment to be at the clinic for a whole second year. The good thing about it is that I love working with my clients there, and I get excellent supervision, so ultimately it's not all bad. I just wish I could be doing full-time work in my field this year instead of waiting to really start cranking in the hours and getting paid.
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Vintage Bree: The Cult Meeting
This is not a timely post, but the anecdote came up a while ago, and I realized I really needed to blog it. This prompts me to think about other classic Bree Lore that may be included in the blog over time. So let's call this the first installment of Vintage Bree.
So in the summer of 1994, AstroB, Lola, and I were trying to amuse ourselves in downtown Santa Cruz. We were walking around on a beautiful sunny day, some of us stoned, when we passed by the local library branch. A flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the library caught our attention. It said:
It was advertising a community meeting in which we would find out the fate of the human race! How could we not go?
We entered the meeting room at the library. It was packed with students and townies, maybe fifty or so, and at the front of the room was a panel of men and women, all around middle age, all white, all with shorn hair, most wearing fleece sweatshirts. They said they were the "Away Team" sent by their leaders, Ti and Do (pronounced "Doe," like "Doe, a deer") to educate us about how we could leave our "Earthly shells" and move on to the "Next Evolutionary Level Above Human."
I've given something away in that last link, but for those of you still scratching your heads, yes, we had stumbled upon a Heaven's Gate cult meeting three years before they would make headlines as the largest group suicide on U.S. soil. The shit they were talking about was weird, but it didn't occur to us, or apparently to anyone else in the meeting, that this was a suicide cult. There were definitely people there for the same reasons we were: to gawk, to be amused. And there were people who were dead serious and listened to the Away Team like they were speaking the direct word of God.
There was unfortunately at least one woman at that meeting who would go on to join Heaven's Gate and kill herself along with her fellow cult members at Rancho Santa Fe on March 26, 1997. Her name was Gail Maeder, a woman in her late twenties from Sag Harbor, New York. One of my friends in Santa Cruz had grown up with her.
One of the men we saw at the recruitment meeting in Santa Cruz who later took his own life in the group suicide.
So, back at the meeting at the Santa Cruz library, you can imagine the kinds of rumblings that were going on in the audience. The Away Team likened their leader, Marshall Applewhite to Moses and Jesus (though not to Mohammed). Not only that, they insisted that these religious prophets were direct representatives from the Next Level, sent to Earth to recruit humans in their time, just like Do was. I scrawled a note to B. – "Did 'the next level' send any representatives to Earth before the Judeo-Christian era? Or to Africa, the Far East, S. America, etc.?" We snickered. Apparently most of the world's population, the poorest people, incidentally, were not ready to evolve.
They kept going on about how when the comet Hale-Bopp arrived, we would know it's the time to depart our earthly existence aboard a great spaceship. They talked about what we would encounter when we got to the Level Above Human: there would be no war and no suffering. It was a realm beyond temporal and spatial reality as we knew it. It was beyond the realm of the sexual, and when we joined the Next Level, we would no longer need our bodies (a.k.a. our "earthly shells") or feel sexual desire (and, no, they didn't happen to mention that many of the male cult members had elected to castrate themselves, possibly an elaborate and ugly manifestation of Marshall Applewhite's shame about his own homosexuality.)
At this point in the talk, a woman stood up from the audience. She was someone I had encountered in town many times before, a local eccentric-with-a-capital-E named Elana Smith who went by the moniker "Clitora Cummings." Anyone who's lived in Santa Cruz in the last thirty years probably has a story about Clitora (you can meet her for yourself in this video interview). She stood up at the repetition of the mantra about the Next Level being a "non-sexual realm" and shouted to all who could hear, "Fuck this shit! I'm gonna go get LAID!" and, most appropriately, she stormed out of the room.
Maybe she saved some lives that day.
So in the summer of 1994, AstroB, Lola, and I were trying to amuse ourselves in downtown Santa Cruz. We were walking around on a beautiful sunny day, some of us stoned, when we passed by the local library branch. A flyer posted on the bulletin board outside the library caught our attention. It said:
It was advertising a community meeting in which we would find out the fate of the human race! How could we not go? We entered the meeting room at the library. It was packed with students and townies, maybe fifty or so, and at the front of the room was a panel of men and women, all around middle age, all white, all with shorn hair, most wearing fleece sweatshirts. They said they were the "Away Team" sent by their leaders, Ti and Do (pronounced "Doe," like "Doe, a deer") to educate us about how we could leave our "Earthly shells" and move on to the "Next Evolutionary Level Above Human."
I've given something away in that last link, but for those of you still scratching your heads, yes, we had stumbled upon a Heaven's Gate cult meeting three years before they would make headlines as the largest group suicide on U.S. soil. The shit they were talking about was weird, but it didn't occur to us, or apparently to anyone else in the meeting, that this was a suicide cult. There were definitely people there for the same reasons we were: to gawk, to be amused. And there were people who were dead serious and listened to the Away Team like they were speaking the direct word of God.
There was unfortunately at least one woman at that meeting who would go on to join Heaven's Gate and kill herself along with her fellow cult members at Rancho Santa Fe on March 26, 1997. Her name was Gail Maeder, a woman in her late twenties from Sag Harbor, New York. One of my friends in Santa Cruz had grown up with her.
One of the men we saw at the recruitment meeting in Santa Cruz who later took his own life in the group suicide.So, back at the meeting at the Santa Cruz library, you can imagine the kinds of rumblings that were going on in the audience. The Away Team likened their leader, Marshall Applewhite to Moses and Jesus (though not to Mohammed). Not only that, they insisted that these religious prophets were direct representatives from the Next Level, sent to Earth to recruit humans in their time, just like Do was. I scrawled a note to B. – "Did 'the next level' send any representatives to Earth before the Judeo-Christian era? Or to Africa, the Far East, S. America, etc.?" We snickered. Apparently most of the world's population, the poorest people, incidentally, were not ready to evolve.
They kept going on about how when the comet Hale-Bopp arrived, we would know it's the time to depart our earthly existence aboard a great spaceship. They talked about what we would encounter when we got to the Level Above Human: there would be no war and no suffering. It was a realm beyond temporal and spatial reality as we knew it. It was beyond the realm of the sexual, and when we joined the Next Level, we would no longer need our bodies (a.k.a. our "earthly shells") or feel sexual desire (and, no, they didn't happen to mention that many of the male cult members had elected to castrate themselves, possibly an elaborate and ugly manifestation of Marshall Applewhite's shame about his own homosexuality.)
At this point in the talk, a woman stood up from the audience. She was someone I had encountered in town many times before, a local eccentric-with-a-capital-E named Elana Smith who went by the moniker "Clitora Cummings." Anyone who's lived in Santa Cruz in the last thirty years probably has a story about Clitora (you can meet her for yourself in this video interview). She stood up at the repetition of the mantra about the Next Level being a "non-sexual realm" and shouted to all who could hear, "Fuck this shit! I'm gonna go get LAID!" and, most appropriately, she stormed out of the room.
Maybe she saved some lives that day.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
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