For those of you who are unaware of what is going on, allow me to give you a quick run-down:
I teased you all with a little story, promising information about fake nuts being busted and cults being joined. That was a few days ago. I insisted that I would not be able to tell you the next part of the story unless I had 30 comments by Sunday morning. It was actually a very close call, because the 30th comment came in just in time.
If you don't know what I am talking about, go back to that post by clicking
here.
So you guys get part two of this story. This story is pretty dense, and I have had trouble consolidating it. Hopefully you find it interesting. The weekend in question was certainly one of the most bizarre in recent memory.
First though:
I wanted to take a minute to address a few of the comments from part one. Briefly:
Anonymous: I still remember that adventure in Wyoming as one of the funniest times of my entire life.
George: Charles' Drops can make you paint like that, and better!
Barreness: The ingredients are a secret, just like the ingredients in all the other crap you can buy at your local hippie supply store (read: Whole Foods). Because, as long as Big Pharma isn't producing it, it
must be good for you.
Meredith: Dick lips are hard to explain, but it involves friction burn.
Chanel: Yes, big huge boobs are not attractive to this guy here. Also: you will learn shortly how a guy fakes an orgasm.
Candice: I love pyramid schemes. I am down. Let's start a religion, too.
Empress: I don't have any pictures of dick lips.
Waldoni: I didn't injure you on purpose.
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One more thing here: I wanted you guys to know that we discovered my cat likes certain human food. We didn't know this before just a couple of weeks ago. Her favorite, so far, seems to be lettuce. Anyway, I took some pictures of her sitting at the table that I just had to share because they are particularly cute.
Maggie anticipates human food....
Maggie eats human food!
You guys are like: "fuck, we don't care about your stupid ass cat."
Well up yours.
Here's part 2.
Part 2
So here is what the tentative schedule for the cult weekend was supposed to be like:
If it's too small, click it to see it more clearly.
I still had no idea what to expect from the "seminar." Some of my co-workers had been involved with the seminars before I had, and they called them "P.S.I. Seminars," pronounced "sigh seminars." All they would say to me when I asked them what it was about or what the purpose of it was is vague shit like "it is a really special experience," or, "I think you will really enjoy it, but I can't tell you anything about it."
Being the techno-phile that I am, I went straight to the internet. The official "PSI" website can be found
here, but it looks quite different than it did when I originally saw it. The website was almost as vague as my co-workers had been. I was able to find some other sites though where people had reviewed the "PSI Seminar" experience. I recall some people saying that it was a scam, while some people said that it was the best thing that ever happened to them. One guy wrote about how his wife had maxed out several credit cards and basically sold everything that they had owned in order to do more "PSI Seminars," and that he was going to divorce her.
I began to feel less and less like I was going to one of these:
...and more and more afraid that I was going to be forced to drink some of this...
All the while my Blackberry was still blowin' up with texts from Courtney, or Alice, or whatever-the-hell her name was, indicating how excited she was to see me and "blah blah blah."
I'm still not trying to be a total dick here. I was just frustrated with that part of the situation. I had told her not to come. I was not good at like, rejecting girls that were that clingy. I was starting to feel like ol' horse-tooth was a little crazy. The other thing I was concerned about was that my employer and his wife seemed very insistant that I take this whole seminar thing very seriously. They indicated that at the end of the seminar on Friday, I would need to really be alone and quiet for a while so I could let the seminar "sink in" through some deep contemplation.
I was flabbergasted to hear my boss talking this way, because normally he was a relatively straight-shooting guy as far as logic went. It seemed very strange, but I knew by the way they were talking that it would be inappropriate (to my boss and his wife) for me to have the girl from Nebraska at the hotel with me all weekend. At the very least, it would be a distraction from something that could possibly be life changing for me.
This was going to be a stressful weekend. And so it started. I left work early on Thursday, picked up the female from her parents house (I had half expected her Craigslist ride-share to kill her somewhere in the middle of Nebraska and to bury her in a corn field, but that didn't happen), and headed down to Denver, to this Holiday Inn on Colorado Blvd:
The drive down was nearly silent. I think that the chick kept trying to like, kiss me and shit. I should have said: "don't kiss me, you deranged bitch," but instead I think I just averted my lips and cried on the inside while she kissed my cheek and held my hand. She didn't talk much. She seemed really awkward, which I am sure is because I was deliberately acting really awkward.
Let me try to explain that a little better. You know how when you really know someone well, and you are mad at them, so you just ignore them and pretend they aren't there? But, it doesn't seem totally weird because you know them, and they know why you are ignoring them, presumably...? It's just, silence for silence sake?
Well, that is almost what I was doing with Courtney, only she didn't know a damn thing about me. She was too thick-headed to realize through all of my pleading that I didn't want to see her and that I had wished she wouldn't come to Colorado. So now, silent in the car, who knows what she thought? I was just dead silent, and she was awkward and fidgety, and after a while, silent herself. She may have thought I was nervous, pre-occupied, scared or anything else. Who knows? I just know that she didn't realize I was just trying to pretend that she wasn't even there.
We arrived, checked into the room, and I found the check in area for the seminar. They told me to wait for a little bit, and that we would all be going into this big conference room to see the beginning of the seminar. I had left Courtney in the hotel room and told her that I would see her in a while. What else could I do?
I milled around awkwardly outside of the conference room with a bunch of other folks, mostly older than me, who were also waiting for the seminar to begin. The people that seemed to be "in the know" were calling the seminar the "Basic," which meant nothing to me.
I asked some other people whether they knew what to expect from this. A couple of them seemed like they were the type of people who did this thing regularly. I was only vaguely aware of it at the time, but these seminars and motivational guru meetings are actually a pretty big industry. Many of the people there at the "Basic" had been to many other types of Seminars before, I found out through idle chit-chat.
I kept wondering to myself: "if you have been to multiple other personal growth weekend events, and you haven't experienced any personal growth yet... isn't it time to try something else?"
I didn't ask that though. Suddenly, loud music started booming from inside the conference room and people started filing up the short flight of stairs into the room. All I could see, roughly, was this:
I can't draw for shit, but there were speakers and a small stage
and some fuck-head dancin' around behind a podium.
So I followed everyone in. There were many rows of chairs, and the music was peppy and upbeat and had some kind of motivational, repetitive lyric scheme. Something like:
"Keep on reachin'
You can do it
Your dreams are here
Get into it"
... or some fuckin' thing.
It took a while for everyone to get inside to get seated, and I couldn't tell for sure, but it seemed that this shitty ass music was designed to loop without sounding as though it had restarted. You could just play it and play it and play it forever, seamlessly. Like some kind of auditory brainwashing machine.
I calculated my seating arrangement risk and chose to sit near the back row, but not quite all the way in the back. As the music played, there were men and women dressed in cheap "dress" clothes who had name-tags on that indicated that they were staff members with PSI, or at least somehow involved in organizing the seminar. They were embarrassing themselves by dancing around the room and attempting to get the new people to get up and dance with them to the music.
One of them approached me:
"Hi! What's your name?" she said. She was middle aged, and had to shout to be heard over the music.
"Charles," I said. I'm quite certain the look I gave her was one of disgust. She kept clapping her hands and shifting her weight from left to right in front of me.
"Come on, get up and dance!" she said, reaching down to grab my hands. I yanked them away from her.
"No. I'm cool." I shouted.
She tried again, reaching down to me, visibly perturbed that I wouldn't dance. I had to think quick.
I shouted: "I just had a hip replacement!"
She stopped clapping to the beat of the music for a moment and looked at me.
"But you are so young!" she said.
"I know!" I said.
I think she knew I was lying, but I didn't give a fuck, and wasn't going to dance.
Thank god this drone started clapping again and wandered off to find some other idiot to bother.
The music stopped finally and this greasy car-salesman lookin' mother fucker with a microphone goes to the front of the room and starts talkin to us. He looked a little like this:
... only greasier and shystier.
First thing, he starts insinuating that all of us newcomers must be absolutely miserable in our lives, because we don't know how to live like he does. He keeps asking us shit like: "what if I told you I could help you end your loneliness forever?" or "I know how to help you realize your true potential as a human being!" or "what would you say if I told you that you could have all the money that you could ever want?"
All the money I could ever want? What the fuck was this guy talking about?! If he knew the secret to having all the money I could ever want, why in fucks name wouldn't he use the secret so that he wouldn't have to do this lame seminar job?! There seemed to be a logical disconnect. Until he told us this:
Because of the PSI seminars program, he claimed, he had realized his true potential as a human being. He claimed to own "five businesses" (he never got any more specific, but simply kept repeating that he owned "five businesses"). He claimed to have multiple houses around the world. He claimed that he had three Corvettes at one of his homes here in Colorado, and that the Corvettes were colored "red, white and blue," because he hadn't been able to decide which patriotic color to get, so he had just paid cash for them all so he wouldn't have to choose.
Like this, I guess....
He said that despite the fact that he owned these houses, cars and companies, he still led PSI seminars because he wanted to "give back" to the organization that had given him all of those things.
I wish I was joking you guys, but I am not. This guy's story was the very worst piece of fiction I had heard since Star Wars: Episodes 1, 2 and 3.
I glanced around to make sure that everyone else in the room was feeling like I was: that this guy was an idiot and a liar and that, by association, this whole PSI thing had to be juvenile bull-shit. Surely you would have to have some kind of severe mental handicap to be able to buy this shit. But when I looked around the room, I didn't see any of this:
I was disgusted to see only this:
I knew for sure, now, that I was in for a long weekend. I turned around and looked for the door. I saw that there was only the one exit door, and two of the PSI staff members were standing to either side of it. I got up and walked toward it. As I went to open it, one of them held me back physically and asked:
"Can I ask where you're going?"
This person is lucky I didn't push his head through the thick wooden door. What business of theirs was it where I was "going?"
"Bathroom," I replied, glaring at them both, "why?"
"Oh, we just like to kind of keep track of everyone here," said the second one, a younger woman. They opened the door for me quietly and let me out.
I peed, and realized I had no choice but to do this thing. My employers had paid, like, $500 (at least) for me to be there that weekend. I felt like I owed it to them to stay, no matter how crazy these people were. Also, I was afraid that they would find out somehow if I left. I liked my job and wanted to be a team player as much as I could.
I went back into the conference room, and the guy kept rambling on, like he would all fuckin' weekend.
That first night, he made us partner up with someone in the room, and we all moved our chairs into groups of two, facing one another. I ended up with some middle-aged burly lookin' man with a beard.
"Good," I thought, "this guy is too manly to buy into this stupid shit."
WRONG!
Minutes later, with the lights in the room dimmed down to "sex-lighting," the greasy car-salesman is leading us through some kind of guided therapy in which we are to pretend that the person sitting in front of us is first our mom, and then our dad. We were to close our eyes and say to the stranger before us what we really wanted to tell our parents, deep down.
People throughout the room were crying. Staff members were walking around with boxes of Kleenex. My partner went first, and started crying too. When I was his stand-in mother, he had nice things to say to me. Apparently I was a pretty good mom to this guy when he was growing up. But goddamn, once I was his dad, he wasn't nearly as happy.
He accused me of "not being there," of "not being supportive," of "hitting him," and of "drinking too much." Then, through baby-wet sobs, he admitted that he still loved me, and he missed me greatly.
I wanted to tell him: "listen dude, I wouldn't have hit you if you wouldn't have been such a little prick." I couldn't believe this manly lookin' guy was crying like a little girl to me.
Then it came to be my turn. I had to pretend this guy was my mother, and then my father.
I will tell you this: neither my mother nor my father are stupid enough to be caught dead at a place like that, and there was no way that I would besmirch the dignity of my parents be saying anything relevant about them at a cult-meeting such as that.
I told the guy that I really enjoyed the childhood he had provided for me, and thanked him for putting up with me when I was a little bastard. I opened my eyes before I was supposed to, and the guy looked really hurt or cheated. I guess he felt bad that he had opened up to me when I hadn't. I cry at Disney movies. I was closer to laughing my ass off, though, at that moment.
Oh well.
The whole PSI thing would prove to be like this. That first night, I went back to the hotel room, ordered a couple of Silvermine Subs, and tried to go to sleep.
(I wasn't going to be intimate with the girl that night, but the least I could do was feed her.)
The reason I classify PSI as a cult is that it is designed merely to take your money in exchange for some reward that is endlessly delayed. The first level of PSI, the "Basic," is supposed to cost like $500 or something, but the levels become increasingly expensive as you sign up for more and more.
While at the Basic, they kind of start out by telling you that you are going to learn something great that weekend, but every time they say they are going to teach you how to "maximize your potential," they end up just telling you that "you can learn more later, on a different phase."
I kept getting these feelings of intense sympathy for the people there who spent their own money on this deal. At least my employer had paid my way.
Every time we had a break (which was just barely long enough for me to smoke two cigarettes), we would walk back into the room where people would be dancing around like headless chickens to that same shitty song about "flying high and pushing into the now" or what-the-fuck-ever.
I couldn't believe I was there. I could have spent that weekend doing... well... anything else. Worse, I couldn't believe that out of the eighty or one-hundred people there, I seemed to be the only one who thought that the whole thing was bullshit. I kept asking anyone who seemed younger and more savvy if they were "buying this," and without fail their response was "oh yeah, I think this is really going to help me turn things around in my life," or something like that. This was unbelievable.
Did they realize that we weren't supposed to leave the room without telling absolute strangers why we were leaving? Did they hear the droning repetition to the music, and the pressure to cave in and become part of the group by dancing with everyone? They had even told everyone that they shouldn't drink any alcohol all weekend. That wasn't a problem for me, because I was sober, but telling normal American's not to drink all weekend just seems like a cult move. Right?
Guided meditation. Leading questions like "wouldn't you be happier if you were earning all the money you could," or "can you imagine being truly fulfilled?"
This is pretty close to what PSI seemed like to me....
Fuck it, though. I had been through a lot in my life. I mean, I'd spent a weekend or five in jail. I had been to Marine Corps boot camp. I had even listened to more than a couple full episodes of the Rush Limbaugh show. I was certain I could survive this. The only other thing I had to survive was this:
My date for the weekend. 'Cause of the long teeth. Get it?
On Friday night, I could tell that Courtney wanted to have some sexual action with me. I was able to avoid that by taking her to the Old Spaghetti Factory, an Italian restaurant in Denver. I happen to love their spaghetti with browned butter and mizithra cheese.
I deliberately took the long way. And then I deliberately got lost. In the below map, the purple line is a fairly direct route from the hotel to the eatery. The red line indicates, more or less, the way I drove.
I got lost again on the way back to the hotel, and by the time we got back, it was so late that there was nothing for us to do but to quietly and awkwardly fall asleep. I think I let her give me a peck on the lips, but only so I could avoid her getting too weird or unpleasant.
On Saturday, at the cult, they put the hard sell on all of us. This was the most serious and important part of the Seminar to these blood-thirsty vultures, I could tell, because there were extra staff there, and more than one shysty guy addressed us that day. They showed us a slide show of how much fun people had at the higher-levels of PSI. Apparently, as you got up in the levels, eventually you could visit their rustic compound somewhere in Northern California. I imagined it looked a little like this:
...only, you know, before the ATF decided to set it on fire deliberately burning alive many men women and children.
Then they told us that we would get a slight discount (I think $400 off of the $1200 list price) of the next level of seminar if we signed up right then and there. They continued with their leading questions, and they asked the questions with a microphone in front of everyone. They told us that they had affordable payment plans and that we could use our credit cards.
To my utter fucking amazement, people began to get up and file toward the back of the room like zombies to sign up for the next level. I was dumbfounded. After someone would sign up, they would be ushered to the front of the room and applauded (for giving away money for nothing). I have been around people who had legitimate full-blown methamphetamine-induced psychosis who behaved more intelligently and autonomously than the people there.
"Why did you decide to sign up for the next level?" they would ask.
"Well, I'm just really tired of not knowing who I am. I want to do something with my life!" they would reply, and everyone would clap.
One staff member came over and talked to me in a hushed voice.
"Do you think you're going to be able to sign up for the next level?"
"No, man. I'm poor. My boss paid for this one, but I couldn't have even afforded this otherwise."
He looked sad, but then said: "well, do you have any credit cards?"
I wanted to chop this fucker in the throat like a ninja.
"My credit cards are maxed out," I replied dismissively.
"Well, maybe you could get a loan somehow..." he said. I remembered the story on the internet about the marriage that was ended because the wife had spent all the money on this. That wife's ruined marriage had began in a situation just like this.
I still couldn't believe that I was the only one there who seemed to think this was all stinky, stinky horse-shit. That weekend, I lost a part of what little respect I had left for the American public, seeing how gullible and easily duped people really were. How easily people could be wrangled into a mob mentality. How easily people would throw away money for a quick fix bull-shit lie.
I'd like to take this opportunity to interrupt and remind you that Charles' Drops is the ultimate homeopathic remedy that will cure anything you have wrong with you and, most likely, make you live forever.
I had respect for whoever had created PSI, though. Whoever was at the top of this thing was keen and smart and was making a lot of fucking money off of a lot of stupid people. Not only were they sapping money from people, but even labor, as I discovered. I found out at some point that more than half of the PSI staff members there that weekend were "volunteer staff members." They were people who were involved in PSI and had previously attended the Basic seminar. They encouraged us all to come back and volunteer our free labor to the money making scheme. They called this "auditing." What a bunch of suckers.
The guy at the top of PSI is an amoral, rich genius.
That night, I found myself smothered by two of the biggest breasts I have ever personally encountered. I thought I was going to suffocate under these bad boys, and I was terrified, but horse-tooth was determined this time to get some sexual action going.
I just wanted to sleep. So I had to do what I had to do.
Here are the steps to faking a man-gasm (presuming that you don't like the girl you are faking it with.)
1. Don't do any romantic fore-play. There is no need to. If the girl is experienced at all, she will know that your lack of fore-play indicates both a lack of interest and a large degree of selfishness. This is good, because you don't want her coming back for more. If she is not experienced, then she will just think that this is how some sexual encounters go, and she will not think much of it. (This is the situation I had on cult weekend.)
2. You must wear a condom, for obvious reasons. In fact, you should wear a condom anyway. Unlike homeopathy, organic food, chiropractic medicine, PSI seminars and acai berry, condoms are actually beneficial in terms of health. Here's the brand I used:
I found the text of the packaging remarkably specific to my needs. They really do have a condom for every occasion.
3. You must make it quick. As soon as you can even get half-aroused (to do this, think about Princess Leia in the first act of Return of the Jedi) get your Extra Small condom on and get to work. You can even time yourself, like I did, if there is an alarm clock nearby. I gave horse-tooth about 3 minutes of the least passionate "in-out-in-out" in human history. She laid there like a dead fish. I faked some grunting noises.
4. When the 3 minutes have passed, try to go cross-eyed and squint a little bit and grunt lounder for about five seconds, followed by a little bit of a yell. Just an animal "grrrrr" will suffice. I wouldn't advise yelling any words, or you might accidentally scream out "YAHTZEE," or something.
5. Immediately after that, you must disembark and get into the bathroom as soon as possible. Flush the used prophylactic and make sure that you no longer have a boner before you walk back out into the open. She will never know that you didn't achieve your pinnacle moment.
6. Say some average shit like "wow, that was good," or something, but don't embellish. The girl will likely feel confused and, at this point, she will probably realize that she should have listened to you before driving across a state and a half with a stranger to see you. She will probably realize that throwing herself at you sexually was a mistake. She will probably realize that she shouldn't have been so pushy and insisting.
7. Either way, you won't have to have sex again that night. If she suggests it, just tell her: "I have never been able to go twice in a row. Sorry."
So the girl went to sleep in silence. She was scooted way over on her side of the bed. I felt bad, but she is the one that jumped on me. I was just trying to get through this nightmare of a weekend.
.....
.....
The rest of this story just gets sadder, not funnier. The next day, at the conclusion of the seminar thing, there was more crying. People really thought that they had embarked on a life-changing journey that was going to bring them love and money and respect. I could see the phony reflections of red, white and blue Corvettes in the eyes of all of those people and I felt really bad for all of them. Checkout at the hotel on Sunday was at noon, and I had been led to believe that the seminar was only going to last a couple of hours longer after that. I told Courtney to go walk around town for a while and to meet me back at the hotel around 2 pm.
Turns out, though, that there was some more tear jerking and hard-selling that the PSI people had to do, even after 2 pm. I figured it couldn't be too much longer.
"Here's the key to my car. You can go wait in there, or whatever you want. Sorry this is taking so long," I told her at break time. I told her I would only be a tiny bit longer.
How was I supposed to know I wouldn't be done for several more hours?
I finally freed myself from the illiterate-convention and made my way back down to the parking garage.
Now, for the first time, I really did feel genuinely bad. The girl was sitting in my car sobbing. Hard.
I guess the wait had been too much for her. If I were her, I would have, like, not stayed in the car. I would have done something else. But she had sat right there in the car like a lost puppy for hours, just crying. I didn't know what to say. At that point, I was genuinely drained and miserable. I hugged her and told her I was sorry and that everything would be ok. It was getting dark, and I drove back toward Greeley as fast as I could.
At some point, she stopped crying, and wanted to hold my hand. I let her.
Then she asked me if we were going to have sex again.
I had never met a girl more awkward or needy. I was starting to realize that she didn't like me or care about me in any way. She had driven to Colorado with the exclusive goal of getting laid and experiencing physical closeness. This was one of the weirder situations I had found myself in with a girl. I was still all weirded out from all the trippy guided meditation and trust building activities at PSI. And now horse-tooth had stopped being awkward and annoying and had now become simply creepy.
I tried to distract her with other talk as long as I could. Then, as we finally approached my apartment, I told her: "I don't want to have sex with you."
She looked shocked.
"I am going to sleep on my couch and you can sleep in my bed. I will take you home in the morning, ok?"
She wanted to know why.
"I just don't want to."
I didn't know what else to say. She started crying hysterically again, and didn't stop crying before I fell asleep alone on the couch.
The next day, I took her to her parents house before I went to work.
My boss wanted to know what I thought of the PSI experience.
"It was really awesome. I learned a lot about myself," I said, with a straight face.
It was done. I had joined a cult for a weekend and faked an orgasm. I had survived.
And there will be no part 3 because I am tired of writing about this.
What do you guys think? Have any of you been to PSI or something like it? Have any of you guys ever faked an orgasm? Did you even make it all the way through this long-ass post?
Let me know what I should write about next.
Oh, and one more thing: the next time that Courtney came to Colorado, she texted me repeatedly asking me if she could come see me at the place where I worked. I told her repeatedly no. She was just not getting the hint. Then, suddenly, I looked out the window from my desk and I see her walking across the fuckin' parking lot toward the building. I ran outside to intercept her there. She had brought me an iced Americano (how the fuck did she know my favorite coffee drink?) and she wanted to kiss and hug me.
STILL!
Psycho! I don't know what I said, but whatever it was, I made her cry again and I finally got my point across because I never heard from her again. Horse-tooth, if you are reading this... you were just a little too forward. And your teeth weirded me out.
Thanks for reading everyone. I am highly ashamed of myself.
Love.
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