Time to wrap it up
It's blueberry season here and we've been soooo busy (we have 8 huge blueberry bushes) -- picking, freezing, baking, etc. Whew! Want to come over for blueberry pancakes? We're even having them for dinner these days.
The end of the story:
We lived in Clearwater for 3 years -- Spring 2005 - Spring 2008. Which was 3 years too long. Every day we'd open the front door, look out, and shrug, "Crap, it's still Florida." I had put some money on account at Flag and went to see about getting started. Not easy to get anything done around there unless you have your checkbook out. Then, everybody's your best friend and will get you going ASAP. First stop, Ethics. Seems somebody there didn't like the results of the conditions I'd done way back at AO and wanted them re-done. OK. Actually, I did a long write-up about all the stuff we'd done with Way to Happiness, VMs, auditing, and helping the San Diego Org with their Ideal Org boogie, and after about three weeks, I finally heard back that it was ok'd. Great, now I get the auditing. The C/S had a big Advance Program all laid out for me. Wait, what? I'd just done a big Advance Program at AOLA. Hmmm...seems Flag has different Ad. Progs. from AO's programs. Why would that be?
I don't remember much, but I DO remember the tailor-made FPRD. Because I'd worked with Hubbard, they came up with all kinds of questions having to do with hurting, lying to, cheating, doing bad things to Hubbard. Oh. My. God. Whatever. I had to come clean about that stupid compass cover that I hid in the Bosun's Locker. Fine, now you know. Eventually I was sent to Qual for some kind of interview. The person doing it seemed uncomfortable and was tippy-toeing around, not quite saying what she wanted to say. I got so frustrated I finally asked her, "Are you trying to tell me I'm not Clear?" She was so relieved. Yup, not Clear. And I just realized today as I was thinking about writing this, how did they come up with that? They had never found my folders and I'd done the Clearing Course and attested at Saint Hill. They never explained it. But now, looking back and putting the pieces together, I believe they really had no idea at all about whether I was Clear or not -- it was a good way to get me to buy more intensives. Which I did. Next up was NED. Maybe the reasoning behind 'not clear' was that I'd never done any Dianetics. None. Nada. Not even Book One and certainly not NED. Boy, I hated that! Hated it. It just ground on and on. And I said so, every session. "This is not helping, I hate this, I can't do this." And so on. Finally the C/S had a cognition and let me off the NED. The auditor asked me a listing question, and boom! we were done and I was Clear. Whoopee. It wasn't anything like the first time when I felt so fantastic. I was truly flying when I left St. Hill. It didn't last long, but at the time it was absolutely the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I didn't get any more auditing at Flag. We'd run out of money, thank God. Actually we still had some, but we weren't telling anybody about it. We were putting money on account from time to time for Kim to do OT V, which he'd already paid for twice and been detoured. To actually make progress on the "bridge" would have been a very very big deal. Don't they want to deliver what they promised? Guess not.
The bottom started to drop out soon after that. We'd go to events and be chased out of our seats because some mucky-muck wanted them. We were regged heavily for SuperPower, IAS, OT Committee, advance payments, CCHR, ABLE. It never stopped. One night Howard Becker and Michael
Roberts showed up at our front door. Pretty weird since they're West coast IAS freaks. But there they were in all their paranoid glory. Had we invited them? Were we expecting them late at night? Hell no. We were dumb enough to let them in. We'd had experience with Becker and knew he liked to lay it on thick. So I told him what I really thought (for a change), which was, "How come all these emergencies never get taken care of? Why do they keep coming up? Why don't we ever see any indication in the media that all the stuff you're doing is being noticed? No-one ever hears anything after you raise all that money for whatever the project du jour is and then it just drops off the edge of the earth. What's that about?" He was veeeery good. Didn't bat an eyelash. Smiled. Rambled on using scieno baffle-gab for a bit and then said how much $$$ he needed that minute for that week's dire critical crucial grave momentous earth-changing crisis. We wrote a check for a few hundred dollars. He tried hard to get more, but we were done with him. Our response: Take it or leave it.
Somewhere around this time, Kim got an email from his daughter saying Jeff wanted to let us know he was "out" and how to contact him if we wanted to. IF WE WANTED TO??!! Yikes! Kim got in touch immediately and wanted the whole story. Jeff went easy and didn't unload everything all at once. He was being careful in case we were still true-blue bubble-heads. He was "protecting" us. Huh. We made a trip to San Diego and spent a day with Jeff, hearing a little more about what was going on. When we got back to Clearwater, one of our friends had been kicked out of Flag -- persona non gratis or something. She asked us if we'd go to an event with her because no one else would. We said "Of course we'll go with you, you're our friend." At Ruth Eckert Hall she was denied entrance. We were dumbfounded. Another WTF moment. So we took her home and had a lovely dessert and watched a good movie. She has since disconnected from us -- even though Flag is the Mecca of Technical Perfection All Glorious and Hallowed, they couldn't get her through KTL and LOC. The San Diego Org had sent her to Flag because THEY couldn't deal with her. AND SHE STILL THOUGHT SCIENTOLOGY WAS SOME SORT OF ANSWER FOR HER!
Butsoanyway. A huge pile of little things finally tipped us. I was happy the end was coming, it was miserable being in Florida and I was getting more and more hostile towards cos. One day I called Jeff and asked him to tell me all of it. He did. And he'd already told Kim a lot of it. Now Kim and I were on the same page. It was all crap, lies, a big con. And, on top of that, the head of the whole disgusting circus was a maniac and a bully. OK.
Jeff told us about Mick Wenlock's XSO group. We joined with phony names and started chatting with other XSOs. Soooo interesting. Well, I posted something that apparently was traceable to me -- that is, a story that would have to have come from me. OSA sent someone to our house with printouts of our posts. She said we had to stop being on that board and we had to stop talking to Jeff. ORLY?! We laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed. "You want us to choose YOU over JEFF?!" Come on. Do your worst sister. Nobody fucks with this family. Nobody.
And then we were out. Done. No more regges (except for the poor slobs who didn't get the memo). No more stupid committee meetings. No more volunteering at CCHR. No more dumb seminars put on by worn-out OTs.
Yes, we got all our money back -- even some we'd forgotten about (an old Freewinds account). It was fast and easy.
It took another year for our house to sell because of the market crash, but we left Florida. When we crossed the state line into Georgia, we opened a bottle of champagne.
Now we're free.
It represents well your condition at that moment in time...
