Notes on Consulting the 'Owner's Manual for the Human Mind'!

Scientologists are crazy -- and (I know, I know) we all hear about it so much it gets filed away in the "Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before file" in all our psyches, so, if anything, we feel petty picking on them.

BUT: the account in Marco Vassi's "The Stoned Apocalypse" (his autobiographical memoir) is scary as shit. Vassi ends up so wigged out by the cult's "attention" that ends up fleeing New York City altogether [this is in the '60s] and checking out life on the West Coast.

ALSO: they sued Olympia Press out of existence (likely due in part to some investigative journalism about them that Wm. Burroughs published, after he found out how they were putting Hubbard's potential useful psychic insights into actual practice), something I first learned about from a stray reference in Ramsey Campbell's excellent and terrifying horror novel, "The Nameless."

AND, BY THE WAY: they've all but taken over the city of Clearwater, FL as their "base of operations." (Those silly bitches got REACH, man!)

Anyone who's a Scientologist must be crazy and/or have nothing better to think about, or no better way to direct their energies (whatever THAT means!). I'm kind of tired of holding people's hands so they can feel "smart" (even if I'm only doing so by proxy and default, by having to put up with nonsense that I read in mass periodicals & such).

Hence, this story. I think, therefore I vent.