The Journey: Landmark Part 2
...as continued from part 1...
But now we come to the dark side of it all. Many people kept wondering whether Landmark was another business scheme like...Amway? I had never heard of Amway but that name got brought up several times. And Scientology got brought up a few times too.
There was another word that the Forum Leader used, which got in the way of everything else. That word was "enrollment". As he started in on convincing people to call their spouses or parents or children or siblings or whoever else, he referred to these as "enrollment conversations". As a real smash motivator, he encouraged people to "be unreasonable". He stated that being reasonable was what kept them in their state of stagnation, their quiet desperation. So...to make that breakthrough...to really transform their lives...they had to "be unreasonable."
He was very clever about his use of the word "enrollment". He did not bother to actually define the word "enrollment" as he had with some of those words like "authentic" or "transform". He neither confirmed, nor denied the proper use of the word, but merely stated that his use of this word was different from what "people normally associate with the word". But see, when I got home from Saturday night's session, I looked up the word "enrollment", just to put a little perspective on what I was hearing.
According to the dictionary, the word enrollment means "to register, or to enter in a list, catalog, or roll; to prepare a final perfect copy in a written or printed form."
Over and over, he used the term "enrollment conversation" and, after looking that word up, I kept thinking that his improper use of this word was...inauthentic. I suddenly remembered that, at the very, very beginning of the Forum, on Friday morning, he had, indeed, informed everyone that the Landmark Education Forum was, in fact, a business. I wondered how many other people remembered this. He kept encouraging people to be "authentic", yet it seemed to me that if he was truly authentic, he would have stated plainly that the Forum relied upon people who took the course to be the advertisement, to persuade others to also take the course, and that the authenticity and integrity of the Forum would be verified by the enrollee's own experiences.
Now, in checking my notes, (I have an entry in my private journal that I've been using to help recall as much of what happened as I can), I remember that I wasn't just going through issues with my mother and with women, but also recalling two separate situations in my past, when I had been gaybashed. Once, I took a man home to have sex and he tried to strangle me. Then, the second time, I went to the baths in Portland and met a black guy named Tapestry Ashton, who was one of the Radical Faeries and whom I had originally known in San Francisco at those hot tub parties. We left the baths and walked to his place, and on our way there, two guys who were clearly tweeking hard, pulled up in a car, got out of the car, zeroed in on me and began to harass me. They totally ignored Tapestry. Tapestry told me to run. I, unfortunately, was stoned so this sudden confrontation left me in a state of almost childlike confusion. Then one of them punched me in the face and Tapestry actually shouted at me to run. So I ran. I ran for some four blocks, crossed the street and then hid inside an alcove in the old church where the City Nightclub used to be behind. I waited. They didn't follow. Eventually, I saw Tapestry walking up and I came out and he asked me if I was okay. He said after I had run, they simply got back into their car and drove off.
We continued to his place and...sort of had sex but I wasn't really into it, as I was very shaken up by the experience. Also, he had...I can remember three elaborate altars in his apartment. One to Bast, one to Ganesh and one to...Kali. I remember seeing a dead snake, preserved in liquid in a jar on that altar. That altar totally creeped me out and for some reason, I made a connection between what happened to me and his worship of Kali. Perhaps that was just my fear. But despite the fact that we traded phone numbers, when I left Tapestry's place the next day, I felt very relieved and made a very solid decision NOT to ever call him and even avoid him if I could. I have no rational explanation for this. Just that it strikes me as so very odd that, when I was with him, these two drugged out lunatics jumped out of a car and accosted me...and me alone. Between the two of us, he looked far more extreme and unusual (a black guy with long, silvery white dredlocks). All I can say is that, in retrospect, my feeling was that I would have been better to simply stay at the baths and cruise someone else.
Since I'm on this subject, and since these are memoirs about my past, I might as well go deeper into it. We want to believe that we are strong. We all have a sense of dignity. To find myself confronted with TWO psychos, not knowing how to fight and feeling as though even if I did, being stoned would have hindered my abilities...ultimately, having to RUN...this was very humiliating. Let me repeat that. It was VERY humiliating. I even wished I had not reconciled with Tapestry after having run. I wish I had kept running and turned a few blocks and just forgotten about him and either returned to the baths or made my way home.
And the man who tried to strangle me in my own home. This was when I was living in that old haunted house, but AFTER the naked people had moved out and black trenchcoated boys had moved in and all the bedroom doors started sprouting padlocks on them. Granted, they were shitty roommates, but just having them there helped. He knew I had roommates. I had told him and he was nervous about that. He had exhibited several behaviors that would put up red flags in most people, but I guess I was drawn to what I perceived as rough, masculinity...that I see now as blatent hostility. So when he pounced on me, held me down, put his hands around my neck and began to squeeze, saying "ISN'T THIS FUN? THIS IS THE KIND OF FUN I LIKE TO HAVE!", he was also trying to cover my mouth. I got my mouth free for just a split moment and screamed as loud as I could. And then we both heard thumping and rustling about in the bedrooms right above us. He jumped off of me and said, "I don't like you. You scream too much." I told him to leave and he said he was going to finish his beer. I said no, he needed to leave now and I rushed to the door and opened it. He put on his coat and left quickly and made it out the door just before my roommates came downstairs in pajamas and underwear, Dave holding his shotgun. I told them what happened.
Later on, Dave had a conversation with me. He told me I needed to seriously re-evaluate what kind of men I was attracted to. He mentioned that sometimes when we were walking out in public, I would point out men I thought was hot and he was rather disturbed because they seemed dangerous and fucked up to him. I am glad he had that conversation with me, because I listened to him and did, indeed, begin consciously assess what was attractive in a man. I will say now that I see other gay men finding the same things attractive that I used to. Certain types of walks...the stomp, leading with the shoulders, and the "tough" look, which I now see is the look of anger and hostility. Many gay men interpret this as "butch". I see it differently now.
Anyway, all this was being called up during my Saturday session at Landmark, and this is not the kind of thing that I could confront in the way the Forum Leader was commanding us to. I couldn't call up those psychos and confess something and invite them to the Forum...not that I wanted to. These issues were outside of what the Forum was addressing and I didn't know what to do about them.
So when Sunday came around, I found myself just hoping things would get better. And they didn't. I started getting extremely angry just listening to the Forum Leader go on and on. More and more, he was looking like my father, as I remembered him standing at his podium, arrogantly preaching and bullying people around. It wasn't calling up any issues, other than than sense of someone conducting an ugly stage play of an event from my childhood as some kind of sick joke. I suppose he wasn't bullying. But it seemed that way. In my state of anger, I saw everything he said in a different light. I saw it as bullying and he was making people cry.
And to this day, I can honestly say that I have no memory of anything he actually said for all of Sunday...except for occasional mention of people's rackets and that term "enrollment conversation" and his constant encouraging to "be unreasonable".
I finally decided that now was the time for me to take my stand. I'd had enough. He demanded we be unreasonable? Fine. I would be unreasonable. I would go up there and erase everything on his chalkboard and write FUCK THIS SHIT! on it and see what he had to say about that. I was ready to explain to him how inauthentic it was to use the term "enrollment" out of context, to repeat it over and over so as to become subliminal suggestion. I was going to confront him. It took up some nerve. I wasn't sure I could do it. But I told myself that if worse came to worse, I could just walk out of that fucking place. So I raised my hand to be called on.
He didn't call on me.
He called on someone else and that person went up to the microphone and wailed out his problem and the Forum Leader addressed it. Then he asked for someone else. I raised my hand again.
Again, he didn't call on me.
This went on for some four or five rounds. He even looked right at me and then passed me up and called on someone else raising his hand a couple rows back.
It had taken me some two hours to work up the nerve to confront this man, to do everything I could to temper my anger and clear my head and focus on what I needed to say and do. I had to keep steeling myself up. I was going to start by saying, "Well, you're encouraging us to be unreasonable so..." and then I would walk up and write FUCK THIS SHIT on that chalkboard. I was going to do it! I would not back down! YES! I was going to make a big, fucking ugly scene.
But he never called on me. And somehow, that blew the whole thing out of whack. I didn't know what to do. I sat there fuming. And fuming.
I could not think of anything else to do. What I would have liked to do was just step out and think for a bit and then re-enter, but their policy was that once you step out, you can't come back in. You have to STAY IN and endure the situation until the next break. You could not even step out to go to the bathroom!!
I realized the longer I stayed, the angrier I would get. Everything this man was saying was pissing me off. And suddenly jumping up and having an outburst didn't seem to have...quite the same impact I wanted as being called on and then stepping up.
This was the point of no return. I had only one choice. Because I simply COULD...NOT...CALM...DOWN...as long as I had to sit there listening to him go on and on and make other people cry.
So I gathered my things, got up, and quietly walked out.
I opened the doors and walked out into the hall. Some stupid bitch with a big fake smile on her face approached me tried to say something to me but I looked her in the eyes, then looked right past her and kept walking. I took my name tag off and threw it into the garbage.
It was a beautiful day outside. Warm and sunny. And as I kept walking, I just felt better and better. I felt this deep, wonderful peace wash over me. I could not think of anything except how beautiful the day was. This, incidentally, was in the Fremont district of Seattle and I was approaching one of the streets with neat little shops on them. I spotted an antique store and decided, what the hell? I'll do a bit of shopping.
I went in and wandered around. Most everything was way too expensive. But then my eye caught something: a metal scarab with a small loop at the top, so that it could be put on a chain and worn as a pendant around the neck. It was about three quarters of an inch long. Only $12.00. So I bought it. And I felt good.
----------------
All that happened in the early afternoon. I went home and did some writing. At that time, I had a functioning printer so I wrote about the event and printed it out and pasted it into my private journal. Sometime later in the afternoon, I checked my voice-mail and some woman from the Forum left a message asking me to call her. I didn't bother. And I never heard from them again.
I was still friends with Mark Hunter at this time. The following Wednesday, he stopped by to say hello and asked how I was doing. I told him about the Forum. He became interested and asked for details so I really laid out the whole story, right up to where I walked out. I mentioned that I had a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing. I felt like I had failed, but I wasn't sure how. I had noted that my tarot reading had included the Death card and also the 7 of disks: FAILURE. Yet, something about the whole situation seemed fucked up to me and I just could not figure out what else I could possibly do!
Hunter asked me a very interesting question: "What did your hair look like?"
I told him it looked like it did then. At that time my hair was bleached blonde and it conflicted severely with my dark eyebrows and, at that time, I also had a dark, chinstrap beard, -so it was obvious I was not a natural blonde.
"And what were you wearing?"
I told him I was wearing the same long sleeved, button down rayon shirt...except I was also wearing my black, leather blazer.
He asked, "Did you see anyone else looking similar being called on?"
Come to think of it...NO!! And there were some other guys with leather jackets or piercings or had some other "alternative" look about them in the Forum. I can't remember if any of them raised their hands. I know a couple did not. But if any of them did, they didn't get called on.
"See...you're going against your natural hair color. That's often viewed as a kind of rebellion. And black leather is even more so. So he didn't call on you because he probably sensed from your appearance that you would cause trouble like that. He was probably making a point to pick people who looked easily dominated. And if you were angry, it probably showed in the way you sat in your chair and stared at him, like you were demanding that he call on you with your eyes."
And you know, I have been around so many people with tattoos and mohawks and other eccentric or alternative ways of dressing...I have totally forgotten the impact it has on..."those other people" I suppose. It's part of who I am. It's natural to me.
Then I mentioned the scarab pendant and showed it to him. I asked if he knew what it symbolized because I knew he was fairly well educated in Egyptian mysticism.
He said, "It symbolizes death, rebirth and transformation."
----------------
So...in looking back on it all...yes, I got my breakthrough. I got my transformation. I was raised in an environment in which the adults screamed and yelled at each other and called each other names. Every little thing became a power struggle. And I wanted to express my anger to the Forum Leader by doing something that would induce a power struggle. And instead, I learned to just...walk away. I had the choice to enroll and I did. I took that chance. And I DID learn a great deal!! But when the pressure was on, I realized I still had the choice to just get out of there. I didn't have to stay. Nobody was forcing me to and I realized that my choice was the right one.
Perhaps the Forum Leader wasn't really bullying people around. And, perhaps that woman who tried to talk to me was not really a stupid bitch and maybe her smile was not fake. But that was how it seemed to me. So that was..."my story".
I reported the whole thing to Roscoe and he had a different take.
"You didn't do the Forum," he said, "You were there, but you didn't participate. You didn't do it." I listened to his reasoning and thought about it. But, as much as I love that man...we do disagree from time to time, as everyone does. And this time, he was wrong. I did the Forum. And I got what I needed. It just happened in a totally different way than I expected or he expected, or even as THEY had it planned out.
Was it worth it?
Yes, it was.
Would I recommend it to other people?
Eh...depends on the person.
One last thing: This is written on October 2nd, 2009.
My card reading for this week, using the De Es Philosopher's Stone deck, was:
# 15: Insight
# 7: Breakthrough
# 6: Confrontation
I still have the scarab too.
But now we come to the dark side of it all. Many people kept wondering whether Landmark was another business scheme like...Amway? I had never heard of Amway but that name got brought up several times. And Scientology got brought up a few times too.
There was another word that the Forum Leader used, which got in the way of everything else. That word was "enrollment". As he started in on convincing people to call their spouses or parents or children or siblings or whoever else, he referred to these as "enrollment conversations". As a real smash motivator, he encouraged people to "be unreasonable". He stated that being reasonable was what kept them in their state of stagnation, their quiet desperation. So...to make that breakthrough...to really transform their lives...they had to "be unreasonable."
He was very clever about his use of the word "enrollment". He did not bother to actually define the word "enrollment" as he had with some of those words like "authentic" or "transform". He neither confirmed, nor denied the proper use of the word, but merely stated that his use of this word was different from what "people normally associate with the word". But see, when I got home from Saturday night's session, I looked up the word "enrollment", just to put a little perspective on what I was hearing.
According to the dictionary, the word enrollment means "to register, or to enter in a list, catalog, or roll; to prepare a final perfect copy in a written or printed form."
Over and over, he used the term "enrollment conversation" and, after looking that word up, I kept thinking that his improper use of this word was...inauthentic. I suddenly remembered that, at the very, very beginning of the Forum, on Friday morning, he had, indeed, informed everyone that the Landmark Education Forum was, in fact, a business. I wondered how many other people remembered this. He kept encouraging people to be "authentic", yet it seemed to me that if he was truly authentic, he would have stated plainly that the Forum relied upon people who took the course to be the advertisement, to persuade others to also take the course, and that the authenticity and integrity of the Forum would be verified by the enrollee's own experiences.
Now, in checking my notes, (I have an entry in my private journal that I've been using to help recall as much of what happened as I can), I remember that I wasn't just going through issues with my mother and with women, but also recalling two separate situations in my past, when I had been gaybashed. Once, I took a man home to have sex and he tried to strangle me. Then, the second time, I went to the baths in Portland and met a black guy named Tapestry Ashton, who was one of the Radical Faeries and whom I had originally known in San Francisco at those hot tub parties. We left the baths and walked to his place, and on our way there, two guys who were clearly tweeking hard, pulled up in a car, got out of the car, zeroed in on me and began to harass me. They totally ignored Tapestry. Tapestry told me to run. I, unfortunately, was stoned so this sudden confrontation left me in a state of almost childlike confusion. Then one of them punched me in the face and Tapestry actually shouted at me to run. So I ran. I ran for some four blocks, crossed the street and then hid inside an alcove in the old church where the City Nightclub used to be behind. I waited. They didn't follow. Eventually, I saw Tapestry walking up and I came out and he asked me if I was okay. He said after I had run, they simply got back into their car and drove off.
We continued to his place and...sort of had sex but I wasn't really into it, as I was very shaken up by the experience. Also, he had...I can remember three elaborate altars in his apartment. One to Bast, one to Ganesh and one to...Kali. I remember seeing a dead snake, preserved in liquid in a jar on that altar. That altar totally creeped me out and for some reason, I made a connection between what happened to me and his worship of Kali. Perhaps that was just my fear. But despite the fact that we traded phone numbers, when I left Tapestry's place the next day, I felt very relieved and made a very solid decision NOT to ever call him and even avoid him if I could. I have no rational explanation for this. Just that it strikes me as so very odd that, when I was with him, these two drugged out lunatics jumped out of a car and accosted me...and me alone. Between the two of us, he looked far more extreme and unusual (a black guy with long, silvery white dredlocks). All I can say is that, in retrospect, my feeling was that I would have been better to simply stay at the baths and cruise someone else.
Since I'm on this subject, and since these are memoirs about my past, I might as well go deeper into it. We want to believe that we are strong. We all have a sense of dignity. To find myself confronted with TWO psychos, not knowing how to fight and feeling as though even if I did, being stoned would have hindered my abilities...ultimately, having to RUN...this was very humiliating. Let me repeat that. It was VERY humiliating. I even wished I had not reconciled with Tapestry after having run. I wish I had kept running and turned a few blocks and just forgotten about him and either returned to the baths or made my way home.
And the man who tried to strangle me in my own home. This was when I was living in that old haunted house, but AFTER the naked people had moved out and black trenchcoated boys had moved in and all the bedroom doors started sprouting padlocks on them. Granted, they were shitty roommates, but just having them there helped. He knew I had roommates. I had told him and he was nervous about that. He had exhibited several behaviors that would put up red flags in most people, but I guess I was drawn to what I perceived as rough, masculinity...that I see now as blatent hostility. So when he pounced on me, held me down, put his hands around my neck and began to squeeze, saying "ISN'T THIS FUN? THIS IS THE KIND OF FUN I LIKE TO HAVE!", he was also trying to cover my mouth. I got my mouth free for just a split moment and screamed as loud as I could. And then we both heard thumping and rustling about in the bedrooms right above us. He jumped off of me and said, "I don't like you. You scream too much." I told him to leave and he said he was going to finish his beer. I said no, he needed to leave now and I rushed to the door and opened it. He put on his coat and left quickly and made it out the door just before my roommates came downstairs in pajamas and underwear, Dave holding his shotgun. I told them what happened.
Later on, Dave had a conversation with me. He told me I needed to seriously re-evaluate what kind of men I was attracted to. He mentioned that sometimes when we were walking out in public, I would point out men I thought was hot and he was rather disturbed because they seemed dangerous and fucked up to him. I am glad he had that conversation with me, because I listened to him and did, indeed, begin consciously assess what was attractive in a man. I will say now that I see other gay men finding the same things attractive that I used to. Certain types of walks...the stomp, leading with the shoulders, and the "tough" look, which I now see is the look of anger and hostility. Many gay men interpret this as "butch". I see it differently now.
Anyway, all this was being called up during my Saturday session at Landmark, and this is not the kind of thing that I could confront in the way the Forum Leader was commanding us to. I couldn't call up those psychos and confess something and invite them to the Forum...not that I wanted to. These issues were outside of what the Forum was addressing and I didn't know what to do about them.
So when Sunday came around, I found myself just hoping things would get better. And they didn't. I started getting extremely angry just listening to the Forum Leader go on and on. More and more, he was looking like my father, as I remembered him standing at his podium, arrogantly preaching and bullying people around. It wasn't calling up any issues, other than than sense of someone conducting an ugly stage play of an event from my childhood as some kind of sick joke. I suppose he wasn't bullying. But it seemed that way. In my state of anger, I saw everything he said in a different light. I saw it as bullying and he was making people cry.
And to this day, I can honestly say that I have no memory of anything he actually said for all of Sunday...except for occasional mention of people's rackets and that term "enrollment conversation" and his constant encouraging to "be unreasonable".
I finally decided that now was the time for me to take my stand. I'd had enough. He demanded we be unreasonable? Fine. I would be unreasonable. I would go up there and erase everything on his chalkboard and write FUCK THIS SHIT! on it and see what he had to say about that. I was ready to explain to him how inauthentic it was to use the term "enrollment" out of context, to repeat it over and over so as to become subliminal suggestion. I was going to confront him. It took up some nerve. I wasn't sure I could do it. But I told myself that if worse came to worse, I could just walk out of that fucking place. So I raised my hand to be called on.
He didn't call on me.
He called on someone else and that person went up to the microphone and wailed out his problem and the Forum Leader addressed it. Then he asked for someone else. I raised my hand again.
Again, he didn't call on me.
This went on for some four or five rounds. He even looked right at me and then passed me up and called on someone else raising his hand a couple rows back.
It had taken me some two hours to work up the nerve to confront this man, to do everything I could to temper my anger and clear my head and focus on what I needed to say and do. I had to keep steeling myself up. I was going to start by saying, "Well, you're encouraging us to be unreasonable so..." and then I would walk up and write FUCK THIS SHIT on that chalkboard. I was going to do it! I would not back down! YES! I was going to make a big, fucking ugly scene.
But he never called on me. And somehow, that blew the whole thing out of whack. I didn't know what to do. I sat there fuming. And fuming.
I could not think of anything else to do. What I would have liked to do was just step out and think for a bit and then re-enter, but their policy was that once you step out, you can't come back in. You have to STAY IN and endure the situation until the next break. You could not even step out to go to the bathroom!!
I realized the longer I stayed, the angrier I would get. Everything this man was saying was pissing me off. And suddenly jumping up and having an outburst didn't seem to have...quite the same impact I wanted as being called on and then stepping up.
This was the point of no return. I had only one choice. Because I simply COULD...NOT...CALM...DOWN...as long as I had to sit there listening to him go on and on and make other people cry.
So I gathered my things, got up, and quietly walked out.
I opened the doors and walked out into the hall. Some stupid bitch with a big fake smile on her face approached me tried to say something to me but I looked her in the eyes, then looked right past her and kept walking. I took my name tag off and threw it into the garbage.
It was a beautiful day outside. Warm and sunny. And as I kept walking, I just felt better and better. I felt this deep, wonderful peace wash over me. I could not think of anything except how beautiful the day was. This, incidentally, was in the Fremont district of Seattle and I was approaching one of the streets with neat little shops on them. I spotted an antique store and decided, what the hell? I'll do a bit of shopping.
I went in and wandered around. Most everything was way too expensive. But then my eye caught something: a metal scarab with a small loop at the top, so that it could be put on a chain and worn as a pendant around the neck. It was about three quarters of an inch long. Only $12.00. So I bought it. And I felt good.
----------------
All that happened in the early afternoon. I went home and did some writing. At that time, I had a functioning printer so I wrote about the event and printed it out and pasted it into my private journal. Sometime later in the afternoon, I checked my voice-mail and some woman from the Forum left a message asking me to call her. I didn't bother. And I never heard from them again.
I was still friends with Mark Hunter at this time. The following Wednesday, he stopped by to say hello and asked how I was doing. I told him about the Forum. He became interested and asked for details so I really laid out the whole story, right up to where I walked out. I mentioned that I had a lot of mixed feelings about the whole thing. I felt like I had failed, but I wasn't sure how. I had noted that my tarot reading had included the Death card and also the 7 of disks: FAILURE. Yet, something about the whole situation seemed fucked up to me and I just could not figure out what else I could possibly do!
Hunter asked me a very interesting question: "What did your hair look like?"
I told him it looked like it did then. At that time my hair was bleached blonde and it conflicted severely with my dark eyebrows and, at that time, I also had a dark, chinstrap beard, -so it was obvious I was not a natural blonde.
"And what were you wearing?"
I told him I was wearing the same long sleeved, button down rayon shirt...except I was also wearing my black, leather blazer.
He asked, "Did you see anyone else looking similar being called on?"
Come to think of it...NO!! And there were some other guys with leather jackets or piercings or had some other "alternative" look about them in the Forum. I can't remember if any of them raised their hands. I know a couple did not. But if any of them did, they didn't get called on.
"See...you're going against your natural hair color. That's often viewed as a kind of rebellion. And black leather is even more so. So he didn't call on you because he probably sensed from your appearance that you would cause trouble like that. He was probably making a point to pick people who looked easily dominated. And if you were angry, it probably showed in the way you sat in your chair and stared at him, like you were demanding that he call on you with your eyes."
And you know, I have been around so many people with tattoos and mohawks and other eccentric or alternative ways of dressing...I have totally forgotten the impact it has on..."those other people" I suppose. It's part of who I am. It's natural to me.
Then I mentioned the scarab pendant and showed it to him. I asked if he knew what it symbolized because I knew he was fairly well educated in Egyptian mysticism.
He said, "It symbolizes death, rebirth and transformation."
----------------
So...in looking back on it all...yes, I got my breakthrough. I got my transformation. I was raised in an environment in which the adults screamed and yelled at each other and called each other names. Every little thing became a power struggle. And I wanted to express my anger to the Forum Leader by doing something that would induce a power struggle. And instead, I learned to just...walk away. I had the choice to enroll and I did. I took that chance. And I DID learn a great deal!! But when the pressure was on, I realized I still had the choice to just get out of there. I didn't have to stay. Nobody was forcing me to and I realized that my choice was the right one.
Perhaps the Forum Leader wasn't really bullying people around. And, perhaps that woman who tried to talk to me was not really a stupid bitch and maybe her smile was not fake. But that was how it seemed to me. So that was..."my story".
I reported the whole thing to Roscoe and he had a different take.
"You didn't do the Forum," he said, "You were there, but you didn't participate. You didn't do it." I listened to his reasoning and thought about it. But, as much as I love that man...we do disagree from time to time, as everyone does. And this time, he was wrong. I did the Forum. And I got what I needed. It just happened in a totally different way than I expected or he expected, or even as THEY had it planned out.
Was it worth it?
Yes, it was.
Would I recommend it to other people?
Eh...depends on the person.
One last thing: This is written on October 2nd, 2009.
My card reading for this week, using the De Es Philosopher's Stone deck, was:
# 15: Insight
# 7: Breakthrough
# 6: Confrontation
I still have the scarab too.