ZENDIK - PART I
This is a story about mind control.
It is 100% true, to the best of my recollection. If and when I have to fill in the blanks with speculation, I'll mark it as such.
Summary - In August of 2000, I spent a week at a commune in North Carolina with my friend Rahn. They turned out to be a cult. They fucked up my head. Five years later, I'm finally ready to talk about it.
ZENDIK - PART ONE
"HOW I LEARNED TO STOP BITCHING AND START A REVOLUTION"
Rahn had gotten one of Zendik Farm's zines in New Orleans during Mardi Gras of 2000, and was very curious about what the place was actually like. Their website described them as an artist collective with a heavy environmental activist bent. You could go there and create art for a living up in the mountains, surrounded by positive, openminded hippies.
Neither of us had much particularly good going on in our lives. We were both out of work, not at all ready to return to school. Emotionally, we were both in trouble. For Rahn, it was the Mormon life plan that had been laid out since her birth by her family, a plan she didn't want to follow. For me, it was abuse at home.
We were young, troubled, inexperienced, idealistic, ready to change the world--you name it. In other words, the perfect suckers for a place like Zendik Farm.
In Summer of 2000, we had our chance at an escape. First we hit Oregon with Howell for a week-long camping trip, which didn't go well. I'd just turned 20 a few weeks before, and Rahn was still 18. Howell was, as he is now, ageless and peculiar in his shaggy way. We were probably too young to be planning something so stressful as a cross-country camping trip. Still, it would have been a better week if the maps had been accurate, the driving directions less confusing, the weather more likely to NOT drown us in our tents (ahhh, the Pacific Northwest!). Anyway, it just sucked in general. Nobody was happy. We cut the trip short and headed back to Nebraska to plan our next adventure.
Rahn mentioned Zendik and asked if I wanted to go visit the place with her. It took a LOT of persuasion, if I remember correctly, and I agreed at first only because I didn't want her to go alone. I was sure they would eat her alive if they turned out to be a scary-ass religious cult. Rahn was very easygoing, but sometimes she tended to go along with people in order to avoid conflict.
I was a floormat myself back then, but when it came to resisting GROUPS of people, I was well up to the challenge. I have no respect for authority when I feel it is undeserved, and I'm ferocious when something seems unjust to me. I figured if Zendik was full of hinky religious freaks, I would smell it in time to get us both the hell out of there safely. Yeah fucking right.
Just so you know why he's not in this story much: Howell wanted nothing to do with Zendik Farm, beyond dropping us off. I only talked to him through email for most of this, but he gets a bigger part later :)
Before we finalized any plans, we called the Zendiks on the phone--and they sounded awesome. They said they wanted us to come. Zendiks just love sharing their way of life with young people, especially artists! Nobody is rejected at ZF. It's where outsiders go to heal, blah blah blah. They had a HELL of a recruitment campaign. It even suckered ME in. I started to really look forward to it despite my original plan to play bad cop during the vist. They asked us to bring some cash because they would want voluntary donations in exchange for food and lodging--fair enough.
We road-tripped with Howell behind the wheel. The man is a born driver. He has a steering wheel where his lifeline should be and a faithful throng of Dobermans in the back seat that he launches at evildoers through the car's home-made moon roof.
He got us there safely by early afternoon of the next day. The trip was unreal and wonderful. We drove through the clouds, perfect rubes ripe for the plucking and completely unaware of it, feeling like nothing was impossible.
It was like whatever we did, the universe would forgive it. No time will ever be like that again--so amazingly, dreadfully self-directed.
It could only end in disaster.
I realized as we entered town that we should probably call the Asheville police station to check up on Zendik Farm reputations before we drove up the mountain. I thought I was being shrewd and careful. My logic was that if the sheriff said "No, Wulf Zendik was an ax murderer who jerked off to Charles Manson songs" we could just keep right on driving across the East Coast til we reached Howell's town, pack a sandwich, and head back to Nebraska in defeat aboard a Greyhound bus.
That was what we told ourselves, anyway.
The truth is, though, what is easier is usually what gets done--not what's safer. At any rate, by the time we started hearing the warning bells, it was too late in the game to just walk away; we were already being trained to question and 'fix' ourselves rather than trusting our own feelings and running for the hills. That's the usual trapping mechanism of cults, a fact I understand these days without question. Once they have you doubting yourself, the programming moves FAST.
Of course, the cops told us that Zendik Farm was clean and its residents a remarkably well-behaved, model group of citizens. We were satisfied by this, and headed to the address we'd been given.
In Summer of 2000, they were still up on Wildcat Spur, a beautiful misty green mountain in the clouds. It was a perfect place to stage a CreaVolution. The daily MediTranzes were incredibly peaceful up there. We almost attained Ecolibrium, as a matter of fact, even though we were products of the DeathKultur. Wonderful Living Therapy, in other words. Wulf would have been so proud.
Confused yet? So was I. You learn the lingo as you go, though. It's heartbreakingly simple vocabulary, perfect for slogans and brain-mushifying. I feel like such a moron just writing out their buzzwords and realizing that I fucking went there willingly. The modern me would have laughed his ass off and waved the whole thing off as a pile of airy-fairy new-age bullshit.
Anyway. Upon arriving, we found a neat little village in the trees up a long, long gravel road. The dirt was red and full of granite chunks. When it rained, the ground turned into a soup of orange grease that never completely washed out of any fabric it stained. I think I still have a pair of Zendik Orange socks somewhere.
There were a lot of dogs at the Farm, most of them sick, crippled or so old they were both. The Zendiks adopted them, and a number of cats. They seemed on the raggedy side of happy. There were also a bunch of small children running around, and I paid a lot of attention to these.
I figured the kids would be the first sign of Zombie Religious Fervor--mistake number one. The kids are treasured property on Zendik Farm, being the next generation of the Creavolution wankery and all. They were bright, trauma-free and very healthy.
I took this as a sign that Zendik Farm was probably not a place where violence was commonplace. I was wrong in this would-be wise act of deduction. I was wrong about pretty much everything that month, as it turned out. What a shitty time for a rash of bad judgment calls.
The tour we took of the grounds was pretty awesome, as the property was truly beautiful. We saw the goats, the horse barn, the outhouses. No pissing allowed in there, because it makes them stink like nothing you can possibly imagine. Where are you supposed to piss, then? Tell you in a few minutes.
Finally we toured the cabins. We saw the main cabin and met some of the Zendiks. They were pretty cool people, very courteous and open. The women were tiny and alternative-looking, small-chested and strong limbed without exception. The men were buff and trim, outdoorsy Warrior Poet types.
I looked at Rahn's skinny blonde ass blending into this backdrop of health, and felt the first stirrings of inadequacy. I seemed to be the only fat person among the 72-odd Zendiks. The only person with funny colored hair. Where were the freaks like me?
I started to kind of worry, as we met more and more people, that I might be the only fat person in the entire state of North Carolina. That's how cult mentality works, though--by exploiting any fear of 'otherness' that might crop up. As time went by, my doubt was increased to the brink of full-fledged self-loathing. But we'll get to that later.
Back to the Farm Zombies:
There was one black man, one biracial girl (I think, though maybe there were two. It was a while ago). One Cambodian-American. The rest were almost unfalteringly white, mostly mid-20s. The older people or Arol's own family kind of swept through these young gods and goddesses like they didn't exist during much of my stay. These were the spear carriers, the worker bees. The upper echelon had no time for them outside of work detail.
The inner crew were Arol Zendik, the charismatic widow of the guy who started the Farm in the first palce (and the property owner), and her immediate circle of friends and family. They owned the land, they fucked the Lady, they made the decisions, they called the shots.
There was a skeezy older guy named Bugsy who seemed to be her lover or something, but even he wasn't immune to Arol's wrath. While I was there, I watched her stand him up and humiliate him in front of 60 people for making some kind of mistake. It was vicious and calculated, and everyone gathered close to watch, hungry to see Bugsy taken down a notch in the name of 'Honesty.' Bugsy walked away from that session with a Z-shaped scar where his pride had been.
That's something I learned later about Zendik--they really value Honesty. The only problem is, if your Honesty goes against orders from on high, you get called out in front of everyone so Arol can call you a coward and condemn your weakness until you break. When you cave in, Arol forgives you and everyone's super nice to you again because that's how Honesty works.
The pressure to conform was enforced without fists, but the message was simple and driven home by fear nonetheless. I'm told they have group humiliations and public shaming routinely when members get out-of-line. They say this is necessary to 'cut through the bullshit.' I only saw it happen a few times, and only when Arol was doing the scolding did everyone gather close to condemn the victim with such hard, rapt attention. I've never seen anything like it. Rahn and I were both pretty shocked to see a grown man get a spanking and COME BACK THE NEXT DAY LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED.
There were a few others in power. There was one reddish-blond haired guy with facial hair (Jyre, I think his name was--but I may well be mis-remembering someone else's name, so don't quote me on it), the same one who gave us the tour. He later shamed me (privately, as I wasn't worth a group humiliation, but it was plenty painful even just one-on-one) for 'monopolizing' one of the empty computers to send daily status emails to my family and Howell, who was becoming worried and wanted to be sure Rahn and I were okay.
They were VERY big on cutting off contact with the outside world, but I didn't find out that this policy included friends and family until about 4 days later. Again, too late to set off alarms when it might have done us any good--not that it would have.
I doubt any single Zendik weirdness would have been enough to scare us away, taken at face value and out of context. It's only when I finally put all the troubling incidents together into a single record of our stay at the Farm that the weirdness turned out to be classical cult conditioning at work. And just the act of figuring out what the hell happened in the first place, much less putting it into words, took me five years.
We were given special bowls and cups as visitors. We had to write our names on tape and label them as ours so that we wouldn't get Outsider germs on Zendik dishes. We were allowed to use the same cutlery, though, which was a bit weird. I think now that the germ excuse was just that--an excuse. The purpose of segregated bowls was to keep us apart from the society, to make us want to join. They wanted us to consider our otherness something to be worked off, like religious penitence.
After 10 days, we were told, we could use Zendik dishes like everyone else. They actually had me looking forward to that magic moment, crazy as it sounds. Hell, in a few days they had me wanting to fucking jump through hoops for ANY kind of approval whatsoever, I was so miserable. My pride woudn't let me, though, which I think turned out to be my salvation in the end.
We were given bunks in a large cabin with about 4 other people, all men. There were no privacy curtains in the main room, but our smaller area had a thin curtain across the doorway that was at least symbolically effective while changing clothes.
As for the cabin, I thought it was awesome. The place was beautiful, the people were nice, the kids well-behaved. I swallowed any doubts I might have about the fact that there just didn't seem to be anyone unattractive there. It all seemed so perfect. The food was weird (Tofu, goat cheese, horribly acidic pickles, stuff like that) but delicious. There was a large bath-house on the property, though no working toilets. They actually completed the toilet in the main house about a day before I left. I never got to use it--for a week I pissed in the woods, supremely paranoid that squirrels were checking out my ass.
Pissing was a nightly nuisance, as I was unfamiliar of the area and lived in fear of someone coming along with a flashlight while I was undignified. I eventually learned to be like a pissing ninja--I had spots picked out by day that I would visit at night, provided I could get there and back without being spotted. At first, though, it was pretty tough going.
Pooing in the outhouses wasn't TOO bad if you did it as a buddy system (with one person keeping lookout about ten feet away, that is). There was plenty of reading material placed in the crapper to keep you company if you happened to be bathroom neurotic (I am). Sheafs of Wulf Zendik's old poetry and babble on politics, theory on Creavolution, that kind of stuff. Typical bullshit. They even indoctrinated you on the shitter.
At dawn on our first all-Zendik morning, I woke up needing to use the bathroom, and realized I had no idea where to do it during daylight hours. I opened the cabin door and saw a white ass on the path directly in front of me. There was a woman attached to it. She was squatting on the gravel, urinating like a dog. Without wiping herself with anything, she hiched up her pants and walked on. She saw me come outside so I had to figure out some nice way to say good morning to a lady who pissed on the sidewalk like it weren't no thang. Most awkward moment of my life, I tell you. I peeped out a "Good morning" and spent the next hour trying to find a handy set of bushes.
I can guarantee you that I never went barefoot on the path after that first morning.
I got used to the sight as the week went on, though. Women at Zendik seemed to think it was a matter of pride to be able to squat on the road and just let'er rip. I cannot imagine what they smelled like after a long day of steamy garden work--but that's probably part of why there were very few concrete relationships up there. I mean, even after you take into account the fact that Zendik philosophy was very committed to breaking up couples for their own good.
But that's a whole nother area of wrongness. I'll have to leave it here for now if I want to get any kind of sleep today.
Next up:
ZENDIK - PART II
"HOW THE DEATHKULTUR POLICE ATE MY CREAVOLUTIONIST AESTHETIC"
PS - EDIT: Hey Rahn, could you do a quick fact-check for me, see if I got everyone's names right and stuff? Also, was it Jyre or the black dude who gave us the tour? I seem to remember the black dude showing us around at least part of the place. I wish I could remember his name....
It is 100% true, to the best of my recollection. If and when I have to fill in the blanks with speculation, I'll mark it as such.
Summary - In August of 2000, I spent a week at a commune in North Carolina with my friend Rahn. They turned out to be a cult. They fucked up my head. Five years later, I'm finally ready to talk about it.
ZENDIK - PART ONE
"HOW I LEARNED TO STOP BITCHING AND START A REVOLUTION"
Rahn had gotten one of Zendik Farm's zines in New Orleans during Mardi Gras of 2000, and was very curious about what the place was actually like. Their website described them as an artist collective with a heavy environmental activist bent. You could go there and create art for a living up in the mountains, surrounded by positive, openminded hippies.
Neither of us had much particularly good going on in our lives. We were both out of work, not at all ready to return to school. Emotionally, we were both in trouble. For Rahn, it was the Mormon life plan that had been laid out since her birth by her family, a plan she didn't want to follow. For me, it was abuse at home.
We were young, troubled, inexperienced, idealistic, ready to change the world--you name it. In other words, the perfect suckers for a place like Zendik Farm.
In Summer of 2000, we had our chance at an escape. First we hit Oregon with Howell for a week-long camping trip, which didn't go well. I'd just turned 20 a few weeks before, and Rahn was still 18. Howell was, as he is now, ageless and peculiar in his shaggy way. We were probably too young to be planning something so stressful as a cross-country camping trip. Still, it would have been a better week if the maps had been accurate, the driving directions less confusing, the weather more likely to NOT drown us in our tents (ahhh, the Pacific Northwest!). Anyway, it just sucked in general. Nobody was happy. We cut the trip short and headed back to Nebraska to plan our next adventure.
Rahn mentioned Zendik and asked if I wanted to go visit the place with her. It took a LOT of persuasion, if I remember correctly, and I agreed at first only because I didn't want her to go alone. I was sure they would eat her alive if they turned out to be a scary-ass religious cult. Rahn was very easygoing, but sometimes she tended to go along with people in order to avoid conflict.
I was a floormat myself back then, but when it came to resisting GROUPS of people, I was well up to the challenge. I have no respect for authority when I feel it is undeserved, and I'm ferocious when something seems unjust to me. I figured if Zendik was full of hinky religious freaks, I would smell it in time to get us both the hell out of there safely. Yeah fucking right.
Just so you know why he's not in this story much: Howell wanted nothing to do with Zendik Farm, beyond dropping us off. I only talked to him through email for most of this, but he gets a bigger part later :)
Before we finalized any plans, we called the Zendiks on the phone--and they sounded awesome. They said they wanted us to come. Zendiks just love sharing their way of life with young people, especially artists! Nobody is rejected at ZF. It's where outsiders go to heal, blah blah blah. They had a HELL of a recruitment campaign. It even suckered ME in. I started to really look forward to it despite my original plan to play bad cop during the vist. They asked us to bring some cash because they would want voluntary donations in exchange for food and lodging--fair enough.
We road-tripped with Howell behind the wheel. The man is a born driver. He has a steering wheel where his lifeline should be and a faithful throng of Dobermans in the back seat that he launches at evildoers through the car's home-made moon roof.
He got us there safely by early afternoon of the next day. The trip was unreal and wonderful. We drove through the clouds, perfect rubes ripe for the plucking and completely unaware of it, feeling like nothing was impossible.
It was like whatever we did, the universe would forgive it. No time will ever be like that again--so amazingly, dreadfully self-directed.
It could only end in disaster.
I realized as we entered town that we should probably call the Asheville police station to check up on Zendik Farm reputations before we drove up the mountain. I thought I was being shrewd and careful. My logic was that if the sheriff said "No, Wulf Zendik was an ax murderer who jerked off to Charles Manson songs" we could just keep right on driving across the East Coast til we reached Howell's town, pack a sandwich, and head back to Nebraska in defeat aboard a Greyhound bus.
That was what we told ourselves, anyway.
The truth is, though, what is easier is usually what gets done--not what's safer. At any rate, by the time we started hearing the warning bells, it was too late in the game to just walk away; we were already being trained to question and 'fix' ourselves rather than trusting our own feelings and running for the hills. That's the usual trapping mechanism of cults, a fact I understand these days without question. Once they have you doubting yourself, the programming moves FAST.
Of course, the cops told us that Zendik Farm was clean and its residents a remarkably well-behaved, model group of citizens. We were satisfied by this, and headed to the address we'd been given.
In Summer of 2000, they were still up on Wildcat Spur, a beautiful misty green mountain in the clouds. It was a perfect place to stage a CreaVolution. The daily MediTranzes were incredibly peaceful up there. We almost attained Ecolibrium, as a matter of fact, even though we were products of the DeathKultur. Wonderful Living Therapy, in other words. Wulf would have been so proud.
Confused yet? So was I. You learn the lingo as you go, though. It's heartbreakingly simple vocabulary, perfect for slogans and brain-mushifying. I feel like such a moron just writing out their buzzwords and realizing that I fucking went there willingly. The modern me would have laughed his ass off and waved the whole thing off as a pile of airy-fairy new-age bullshit.
Anyway. Upon arriving, we found a neat little village in the trees up a long, long gravel road. The dirt was red and full of granite chunks. When it rained, the ground turned into a soup of orange grease that never completely washed out of any fabric it stained. I think I still have a pair of Zendik Orange socks somewhere.
There were a lot of dogs at the Farm, most of them sick, crippled or so old they were both. The Zendiks adopted them, and a number of cats. They seemed on the raggedy side of happy. There were also a bunch of small children running around, and I paid a lot of attention to these.
I figured the kids would be the first sign of Zombie Religious Fervor--mistake number one. The kids are treasured property on Zendik Farm, being the next generation of the Creavolution wankery and all. They were bright, trauma-free and very healthy.
I took this as a sign that Zendik Farm was probably not a place where violence was commonplace. I was wrong in this would-be wise act of deduction. I was wrong about pretty much everything that month, as it turned out. What a shitty time for a rash of bad judgment calls.
The tour we took of the grounds was pretty awesome, as the property was truly beautiful. We saw the goats, the horse barn, the outhouses. No pissing allowed in there, because it makes them stink like nothing you can possibly imagine. Where are you supposed to piss, then? Tell you in a few minutes.
Finally we toured the cabins. We saw the main cabin and met some of the Zendiks. They were pretty cool people, very courteous and open. The women were tiny and alternative-looking, small-chested and strong limbed without exception. The men were buff and trim, outdoorsy Warrior Poet types.
I looked at Rahn's skinny blonde ass blending into this backdrop of health, and felt the first stirrings of inadequacy. I seemed to be the only fat person among the 72-odd Zendiks. The only person with funny colored hair. Where were the freaks like me?
I started to kind of worry, as we met more and more people, that I might be the only fat person in the entire state of North Carolina. That's how cult mentality works, though--by exploiting any fear of 'otherness' that might crop up. As time went by, my doubt was increased to the brink of full-fledged self-loathing. But we'll get to that later.
Back to the Farm Zombies:
There was one black man, one biracial girl (I think, though maybe there were two. It was a while ago). One Cambodian-American. The rest were almost unfalteringly white, mostly mid-20s. The older people or Arol's own family kind of swept through these young gods and goddesses like they didn't exist during much of my stay. These were the spear carriers, the worker bees. The upper echelon had no time for them outside of work detail.
The inner crew were Arol Zendik, the charismatic widow of the guy who started the Farm in the first palce (and the property owner), and her immediate circle of friends and family. They owned the land, they fucked the Lady, they made the decisions, they called the shots.
There was a skeezy older guy named Bugsy who seemed to be her lover or something, but even he wasn't immune to Arol's wrath. While I was there, I watched her stand him up and humiliate him in front of 60 people for making some kind of mistake. It was vicious and calculated, and everyone gathered close to watch, hungry to see Bugsy taken down a notch in the name of 'Honesty.' Bugsy walked away from that session with a Z-shaped scar where his pride had been.
That's something I learned later about Zendik--they really value Honesty. The only problem is, if your Honesty goes against orders from on high, you get called out in front of everyone so Arol can call you a coward and condemn your weakness until you break. When you cave in, Arol forgives you and everyone's super nice to you again because that's how Honesty works.
The pressure to conform was enforced without fists, but the message was simple and driven home by fear nonetheless. I'm told they have group humiliations and public shaming routinely when members get out-of-line. They say this is necessary to 'cut through the bullshit.' I only saw it happen a few times, and only when Arol was doing the scolding did everyone gather close to condemn the victim with such hard, rapt attention. I've never seen anything like it. Rahn and I were both pretty shocked to see a grown man get a spanking and COME BACK THE NEXT DAY LIKE IT NEVER HAPPENED.
There were a few others in power. There was one reddish-blond haired guy with facial hair (Jyre, I think his name was--but I may well be mis-remembering someone else's name, so don't quote me on it), the same one who gave us the tour. He later shamed me (privately, as I wasn't worth a group humiliation, but it was plenty painful even just one-on-one) for 'monopolizing' one of the empty computers to send daily status emails to my family and Howell, who was becoming worried and wanted to be sure Rahn and I were okay.
They were VERY big on cutting off contact with the outside world, but I didn't find out that this policy included friends and family until about 4 days later. Again, too late to set off alarms when it might have done us any good--not that it would have.
I doubt any single Zendik weirdness would have been enough to scare us away, taken at face value and out of context. It's only when I finally put all the troubling incidents together into a single record of our stay at the Farm that the weirdness turned out to be classical cult conditioning at work. And just the act of figuring out what the hell happened in the first place, much less putting it into words, took me five years.
We were given special bowls and cups as visitors. We had to write our names on tape and label them as ours so that we wouldn't get Outsider germs on Zendik dishes. We were allowed to use the same cutlery, though, which was a bit weird. I think now that the germ excuse was just that--an excuse. The purpose of segregated bowls was to keep us apart from the society, to make us want to join. They wanted us to consider our otherness something to be worked off, like religious penitence.
After 10 days, we were told, we could use Zendik dishes like everyone else. They actually had me looking forward to that magic moment, crazy as it sounds. Hell, in a few days they had me wanting to fucking jump through hoops for ANY kind of approval whatsoever, I was so miserable. My pride woudn't let me, though, which I think turned out to be my salvation in the end.
We were given bunks in a large cabin with about 4 other people, all men. There were no privacy curtains in the main room, but our smaller area had a thin curtain across the doorway that was at least symbolically effective while changing clothes.
As for the cabin, I thought it was awesome. The place was beautiful, the people were nice, the kids well-behaved. I swallowed any doubts I might have about the fact that there just didn't seem to be anyone unattractive there. It all seemed so perfect. The food was weird (Tofu, goat cheese, horribly acidic pickles, stuff like that) but delicious. There was a large bath-house on the property, though no working toilets. They actually completed the toilet in the main house about a day before I left. I never got to use it--for a week I pissed in the woods, supremely paranoid that squirrels were checking out my ass.
Pissing was a nightly nuisance, as I was unfamiliar of the area and lived in fear of someone coming along with a flashlight while I was undignified. I eventually learned to be like a pissing ninja--I had spots picked out by day that I would visit at night, provided I could get there and back without being spotted. At first, though, it was pretty tough going.
Pooing in the outhouses wasn't TOO bad if you did it as a buddy system (with one person keeping lookout about ten feet away, that is). There was plenty of reading material placed in the crapper to keep you company if you happened to be bathroom neurotic (I am). Sheafs of Wulf Zendik's old poetry and babble on politics, theory on Creavolution, that kind of stuff. Typical bullshit. They even indoctrinated you on the shitter.
At dawn on our first all-Zendik morning, I woke up needing to use the bathroom, and realized I had no idea where to do it during daylight hours. I opened the cabin door and saw a white ass on the path directly in front of me. There was a woman attached to it. She was squatting on the gravel, urinating like a dog. Without wiping herself with anything, she hiched up her pants and walked on. She saw me come outside so I had to figure out some nice way to say good morning to a lady who pissed on the sidewalk like it weren't no thang. Most awkward moment of my life, I tell you. I peeped out a "Good morning" and spent the next hour trying to find a handy set of bushes.
I can guarantee you that I never went barefoot on the path after that first morning.
I got used to the sight as the week went on, though. Women at Zendik seemed to think it was a matter of pride to be able to squat on the road and just let'er rip. I cannot imagine what they smelled like after a long day of steamy garden work--but that's probably part of why there were very few concrete relationships up there. I mean, even after you take into account the fact that Zendik philosophy was very committed to breaking up couples for their own good.
But that's a whole nother area of wrongness. I'll have to leave it here for now if I want to get any kind of sleep today.
Next up:
ZENDIK - PART II
"HOW THE DEATHKULTUR POLICE ATE MY CREAVOLUTIONIST AESTHETIC"
PS - EDIT: Hey Rahn, could you do a quick fact-check for me, see if I got everyone's names right and stuff? Also, was it Jyre or the black dude who gave us the tour? I seem to remember the black dude showing us around at least part of the place. I wish I could remember his name....