The Restaurant I Didn't Go To; The Homeless Guy; No More "Yes Man"

/28/10 1:36:23 AM

When I left work from Weis on Sunday I had an incident with 'them.'

Earlier that day, the guy I called my 'temporary workplace friend' had mentioned that he was going to eat at my favorite restaurant that evening. He did not say it to me - he said it to another guy that was there while we were taking the trash out. I was walking around and didn't hear all of the conversation, so I didn't know if he was going by himself, or with his girlfriend, or with his family, or why he was going there. He was glad to get to eat nice food instead of cereal. I know how that is because when I lived with my parents I always ate cereal as a snack too, sometimes three or four bowls every day, because there was nothing else to eat. (He did live with his parents, although I wasn't sure if he had moved in with his girlfriend, and I haven't asked.)

So when I left work that evening, I was leaving a little bit early, and I often go driving around just to do something and get off my feet for an hour between jobs. I turned left and drove AWAY from the direction of the restaurant, on purpose, to protect myself and to protect him. Immediately 'they' started talking to me and trying to force me to turn around. They told me that he said it in front of me because he wanted me to meet him there at the restaurant. I didn't believe that. Also, I didn't know if he was going there alone or with somebody. Even if he was alone, I don't want to go meet him someplace if he didn't explicitly ask me to meet him there, because I don't want to scare him any more than I already have. It's scary enough to be getting asked out on dates and to be given notes and to be told over and over that text messages and phone calls are being intercepted, and to be told that I 'hear voices' and have other strange problems. I also told him I loved him (I'll get to that story in a minute.) (Oops - I finished this post and was rereading it, and I forgot to ever tell the story.  Basically, I gave him a note telling him I love him and have enjoyed the time I've spent with him - I won't go into detail.)  He doesn't reciprocate and he doesn't initiate. He just responds if I choose to do something. I take that as a kind of negative sign, something to be cautious about.

So I drove, and they gave me this intense physical sensation of being pulled away from something, a tingling sensation at my back commanding me to turn around and drive to the restaurant. They were talking to me and telling me over and over that I was supposed to go there and that I must think of how hurt and disappointed he was going to be if I didn't show up, and that kind of thing, making it sound like he really, really wanted me to be there. And they didn't give up, either. They kept saying it and giving me that sensation.

So I started shouting at them while I drove. 'HE'S THERE WITH HIS *FAMILY*!' Every time I said it, they made me feel weak and uncertain. It's true, I didn't know for certain who he was with, but I assumed the worst. I assumed he was there with other people, instead of assuming he was alone and that he deliberately said it to invite me to go meet him there. I imagined that he had left work and gone home and then his whole family had gone out to eat together. I thought his girlfriend lived a little further away, so it seemed less likely that she would have been there. When I had a conversation with her she had said where she lived, and I vaguely remember where that town is, but I'm not sure.

I am already being creepy enough by giving him these notes and stealing his phone number from the wall of the office and texting him (although he says he hasn't received a lot of my messages, only a few of them, and I can't know for sure.) It would be even more creepy to show up at the restaurant and go sit with him when I wasn't explicitly invited. It would be awkward and uncomfortable if I showed up and he was there with other people. I'd have no excuse for being there, because there wasn't enough TIME for me to actually sit down and eat, since I was between jobs and had only an hour, minus the driving time to get to the restaurant. I'd be able to sit down for about ten minutes at best, which means I couldn't claim that I had gone there to actually order food and eat it.

So, like I said, I drove the opposite way and used up my time between jobs, while shouting at the voices and arguing with them and telling them that it was inappropriate for me to try to meet him there. They kept making me imagine him eating there all by himself, wishing that I would show up, and making me feel sorry for him, and telling me that this was going to make him unable to ask me out again because I had disapointed him and he expected me to be there and I didn't show up. It's true, if he DID expect me, then I would feel bad for him, and I would definitely want to go. But he never invited me, he just mentioned it in front of me, and, as I said, I am already being creepy enough, and I don't want to scare him.

Eventually I turned around and went on to the next job at McD.

When I went in, there was a homeless guy sitting at a booth in the corner, with a laptop, using the wireless internet, playing music and singing loudly off-key. His bike was outside with a bunch of blankets and stuff in the basket. I was told he'd been sitting there all day. I talked to him. He showed me a bunch of pictures that he was getting from Google, pictures of Captain Crunch boxes that had been changed into joke pictures or pornographic versions, and he was collecting them. I asked him if he wanted any more food, because he had an empty tray with some wrappers on it. So I got him some food and I paid for it myself, on purpose, because that felt somehow better than using my free employee meal to buy him something.

He told me he used to live in Bloomsburg and his house burned down, but I don't know how it burned down. He used to be married, but his wife died in a car accident.

Several other employees had talked to him and one lady agreed with me that he seemed friendly enough, but another girl was very, very scared of him. He told me he had Tourette's Syndrome (you suddenly make loud noises or shout strange things and curse words) and I could see he was, overall, not mentally healthy - he was hyperactive and couldn't control his impulses. He also had back pain, so he walked stooped over. Also, later on, he told me that he had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals all of his life, and he had been on Thorazine (and lost all his teeth because of it, he said) and Haldol, and just about every other horribly poisonous drug that has ever been invented, so he has permanent twitches and other effects from those. So, for all those reasons, his behavior was strange and inappropriate. The girl who was scared of him said that he had been banging on the bathroom door while she was trying to clean the bathrooms, and he was saying 'I'm coming to get you, girly,' and things like that.

We had to close the lobby at 1:00 AM. I had warned him that it was closing, but he didn't leave. I went out again and talked to him. After sitting and talking with him for a few minutes, I offered to let him sleep in my car that night. So we got that settled - the manager didn't have to call the police and have him thrown out, which we all wanted to avoid.

He slept in my car that night. When I left work in the morning, I took him home to my apartment. He was begging for me, or somebody, to give him a chance, to trust him, to love him, and to let him live with them.

There are a couple reasons why I did this. First, I really do need help at home. Having someone there helps me get things done, although it has to be someone who has self-restraint, someone who can leave me alone when I need to be alone. I was thinking that I could ask him to do my housecleaning and cooking with me (I can't just tell someone to do something by themselves - I have to do it *with* them, because I want things to be done a certain way).

Second, I really do feel compassion for people who are mentally ill. Mental illness is only physical illness. It's not something you 'choose' to do. I have spent many years reading books and learning things to understand what causes 'mental' illness. It isn't a 'bad belief system.' It isn't because you're 'thinking negative thoughts' or 'distorted thinking' or anything like that. It's a physical sickness in the body, and it's caused by something. For instance, there is a particular nutritional problem where your body isn't able to absorb a particular vitamin, I forget which vitamin, and if you have that disease, it causes symptoms of extremely severe mental illness, distorted thinking, being unable to speak clearly, having strange beliefs, etc. I remember reading that in a book that I bought, called 'When Psychiatric Problems Mask Medical Disorders,' or something like that - I forget the exact title, because it's in a box in storage right now. The idea of the book is that you can have 'psychiatric' or 'mental' problems that are actually a sign of a medical problem. I don't think this is a rare exception, I think instead that ALL 'psychiatric' problems are actually physical diseases, or, at least, are made worse by health problems.

Third, in 2008, 'they' began brainwashing me to become a 'Yes Man,' like Jim Carrey in the movie, where I must say 'yes' to opportunities and things that people ask me to do. They always tell me that if I make friends with a particular 'unwanted' person, like a homeless guy or a guy like Dennis (a customer who used to go to Weis - most people didn't like him and thought he was creepy), then that person would become loyal to me and would 'join the order' or 'become a member.' It would be more accurate to say that they are trying to find guys who are likely to rape me. (And no, my 'favorite guy' is *NOT* in that 'unwanted' category. He has friends, girlfriends, and family, and I get the impression that women seem to like him.)

So they brainwashed me to say 'yes' if guys ask me out, even if I think the guy is unattractive, and I'm supposed to 'make friends' with people who I really don't enjoy being with. They did it to me lots of times over the past couple years, especially if I had been exposed to drug residues and was therefore friendlier than usual. I gave my email address to several people and then had the burden of talking about *their* problems and *their* interests when I myself could barely cope with the hell of my own life. It would be nice if I could talk with people about a subject I was interested in, but no, these were always just random people who had no interests in common with me, people who didn't care about anything that I cared about, or believe anything I believed.

'They' always brainwashed me to believe that, sometime later on, there would be some benefit or reward for making friends with this person, like I would need a friends network of people with certain skills and knowledge, and I was supposed to build an underground economic system of people who would trade favors and sell things outside of the government's fiat money system, in a black market where we would employ each other to do jobs. I had been trying to do this, but it did not fit with my personality - I kept arguing about whether I agreed with their values and beliefs, whether I would help people who were doing things that I didn't believe in, whether I would work for people who were doing tasks that I thought were unimportant, or outright harmful, or just boring, or something I wasn't interested in. Like, if I had a black market employment network, would I want to work with people who were selling a product that I didn't like, like face makeup or unhealthy foods. (I didn't want to be a cake decorator because I didn't want to make brightly colored cakes with icing made of Crisco, but would have to make cakes that were Feingold, all natural, and then, actually, I started to believe that even cakes in general are something you shouldn't eat, even if they're all natural, because you should avoid eating white flour and wheat products and baked goods in general, and sweets in general, and eventually, I believed that everything about cakes was just 'wrong' and that I couldn't stand to make a living by decorating cakes.) So, 'they' always brainwashed me to believe that I would somehow get benefits from social networking, at some vague time in the future, by working with people who I strongly disliked, or people who I only liked a little bit but not very deeply, and instead it was always just me listening to them talking about their problems, or hanging out with an unattractive guy who wanted to have sex with me, and none of them were interested in 'cooperating to make a black market employment network' which would support us as the government's fiat money system collapsed, as more and more people became unemployed.

The closest we came to a 'black market employment network' was when the unattractive guy, Dennis (his whole body smelled like kerosene), started giving me computer gadgets that I didn't really want, as 'prepayment' for sexual favors that I was expected to perform in the future, and paying for my food when we ate together at a restaurant when I EXPLICITLY TOLD HIM that *I* was paying for my own food separately - when I got up to go to the bathroom, he *sneaked* the bill and paid for all of it against my will, and it was over and done with when I came back, and I was expected to be grateful for this and accept it as a prostitution payment, because it was obvious from everything he did, all these 'gifts' that he kept giving me and paying for things, that he wanted to pay me for sex. (Warning, if you are a guy and you go on a date with a woman who *insists* that she wants to pay for her own food, LISTEN TO HER! Do not sneak-pay the bill when she walks away! This was the ultimate insult and very disgusting, and pretty much a guarantee that you will *NOT* get to have sex with her. However, actually, that isn't necessarily true, it's only true if you already know that you're somebody that women don't like, if women always reject you anyway. That applied to this guy. But he only made it worse by paying the bill when I told him not to.)

Anyway, another reason why I took the homeless guy with me was because I like the idea of healing people who have problems, but in reality, it's very difficult to force people to do the things that I think they need to do in order to heal themselves. I always have some kind of a plan or troubleshooting protocol in my mind, which would give someone a sort of 'health makeover' if they are unhealthy - for instance, I imagine putting them on a different diet, like the Feingold Diet or a diet based on Weston Price's primitive diets, and taking out their dental fillings, and decontaminating their belongings, and moving them into another trailer that uses all-electric appliances instead of kerosene or propane or heating oil, and then seeing whether their health improves. (That is why those things are in the Order. People are supposed to join it voluntarily, not by force. They are supposed to be persuaded to believe that these procedures might help them, and they must voluntarily choose to try those things, and then observe the results.)

But I know that you can't just tell people to change their diet - that's very expensive, hard to do, and it requires learning how to cook new foods, and how to eat them *safely*, because there are reasons why we avoid a lot of foods. For instance, lobster liver and fish livers do have valuable vitamin A in them and other vitamins, but they can also contain residues of manmade pollution, mercury, or paralytic shellfish poisoning, or red tide toxins, etc. So you can get food poisoning from eating the livers. We need a *test* to find out if the liver contains those poisons, instead of simply sayiing 'Oh well, we'll just never eat fish livers again,' throwing out the baby with the bathwater and giving up lots of valuable nutrients that we need badly. We need an easy test kit that you can use at home. Our modern diet 'threw out the baby with the bathwater' a LOT of times for many different foods that we never eat anymore. Anyway, those lifestyle changes are very, very hard to do, and I myself cannot comply with those rules, as I haven't even begun to change my diet (although I am on a 'slightly Feingold' diet, avoiding artificial colors and flavors for the most part).

So I always meet these random people, get brainwashed to believe that they're going to obey me and follow the troubleshooting protocols that are meant to improve their health, and then they'll become loyal to me and all that, but in reality they are always people who aren't at all interested in obeying things that I tell them to do, and they're not interested in anything that I like, etc. So when I spend time with them, it is wasted time. I don't even enjoy myself, except just a little bit, but mostly it's a strain. Or if I do enjoy myself, that only encourages them, and they think it means I'll want to have sex later, when I was only enjoying the 'field trip' or whatever we were doing. I went with one guy, Ken, who works with me, to visit some dairy farms in the area, and I find him unattractive, and I don't really enjoy conversation with him either, but I am nowadays in the habit of 'being nice' and just not talking about anything I'm interested in, and just letting the other person decide what to talk about, and I cease to exist, and everything I believe in and everything I care about ceases to exist, I just listen while they talk.

Ken and I went to some dairy farms and it really was interesting. I learned that automatic milking machines are disgusting, and the farmers don't seem to notice that they're disgusting. I saw one farm where the milking machines sent the milk through these pipes, and you could see through the clear plastic of the pipes, and the inside of the pipe was lined with clotted milk all the way through the pipe. It was this hardened, solidified milk, and all the new milk was going through that pipe, touching the old solidified stuff. How long that was in there, I don't know. They rinsed it out by pumping water through it, but the rinsing had almost no effect on the solid white milk lining the whole pipe, it was all still there. So I decided that anything that sends milk through a pipe is probably unsanitary, and it's one of the reasons why milk makes me sick. Instead, milk must be squeezed into a pail, and must never go through any pipes, in order to keep it sanitary.

I know this is true because the same thing used to happen with my drip coffeemaker. I'd buy a brand new coffeemaker, and in the beginning, the coffee didn't make me sick at my stomach. But after using it for a few months, it would get so dirty inside that it couldn't be cleaned, even if I boiled vinegar through it. The inner surfaces and pipes were coated with fungus or slime or something that couldn't be removed. I'd get sick every time I drank the coffee, until buying a clean new coffeemaker, and suddenly the coffee didn't bother me anymore. I have lots of experiences with things where an unclean surface is touching a liquid, and I get sick if I drink it, so I'm sure the same thing applies to the dairy farms.

Well, that was my field trip with Ken. But he wants to continue being friends with me and he still calls me and asks me to do things with him. And I don't enjoy his company, I merely enjoyed going on a field trip.

Those were all other examples of people I was brainwashed to say 'yes' to whenever I didn't really enjoy their company. This homeless guy was the same way.

I took him home. He talked constantly. He interrupted every sentence before I was even halfway through if I tried to talk back to him. (Troubleshooting: Feingold Diet for hyperactives. Give him a wheat-free, milk-free diet. Food has to be ground up for him because he has no teeth left and he can't chew vegetables or other hard foods.) Severe mood swings of emotional clinginess - he would beg me over and over again to love him, love him, love him. (Troubleshooting Step 1: Decontaminate the tobacco from all of his belongings. I touched him - he kept hugging me and touching me a lot - and I reacted very badly to whatever is on him. Lots and lots of tobacco, and something else I'm not sure about, some substance that made me feel miserable and depressed, the way I felt after touching Dennis and getting his kerosene/tobacco/unknown poison mixture. The ideal way to decontaminate from tobacco is to move somebody into a clean house and keep them away from touching all of their old belongings. Troubleshooting Step 2: Feed him healthy foods. Someone who begs to be loved, over and over again, is probably hungry for healthy food. When you 'feel needy,' it's often because you actually feel hungry. Thirsty, too - give him water, not soda, not juice, not coffee, but plain water with nothing in it. He did, however, have a cup of water, so that might not be the problem. Troubleshooting Step 3: Drug withdrawal, stop all drugs. Troubleshooting Step 4: Heal his back pain. He would come to me for a hug whenever his back was hurting him, and say 'I hurt, I hurt.' It was heartbreaking. I don't know how to heal back pain. I only know about nutrition. Proper nutrition can fix osteoporosis. I would troubleshoot osteoporosis and troubleshoot arthritis. Forbid him to drink any milk that contains synthetic vitamin D - he must drink milk that does NOT have any synthetic vitamins added to it - they can cause osteoporosis, and can cause calcium buildup in connective tissue where you aren't supposed to have calcium buildup, which can cause pain in the joints and possibly in the back. Also, he was using Tums, an antacid, or maybe it was the other brand of antacid. Antacids are EXTREMELY bad for you and I suspect that they can cause osteoporosis as well. So he must never use antacids again. All over-the-counter drugs are dangerous. He said that his back pain just started a year ago for no reason - he didn't have an injury or an accident, so it's caused by some kind of gradual deterioration.)

I have all of that knowledge, but no way to enforce it. I don't have a decontamination center where I can send people to live so that they can withdraw from tobacco. I don't have a cafeteria that will serve people nothing but high-quality, Feingold Diet, Weston Price foods from pasture-fed cows and chickens and all that stuff. I don't have much knowledge about healing back injuries and osteoporosis, so I might try these things and they might not help - so we might still need some kind of safe painkiller, and I have no knowledge of cheap, homemade, home-grown painkillers, unless I grow poppies and give them morphine - and I'd rather not try to do that right now, with all my experience of herbal drug residues getting all over everything. Withdrawal from morphine causes terrible symptoms, so if you got contaminated with the oils of poppies, you would keep having those up-and-down swings of getting hit with a drug and then withdrawing from it, every day, every time you touched things.

So in reality, I just spent time babysitting this guy who talked constantly and couldn't listen, and wanted to show me his Captain Crunch box pictures, and he made a bunch of balloon animals - he's really good with that, and he used to work at fairs and festivals making balloon animals. I bought him foods from Burger King, because I still can't really cook in my kitchen, for a variety of reasons, long story (all my pots and pans are in storage; I'm not using Teflon anymore so even if I had my pots and pans out, I wouldn't want to use them, I'd still want to get new ones without any Teflon; my fridge still has the vapors of bone marrow poisoning from a couple months ago, although it's probably been reduced somewhat). So I couldn't even give him a healthy diet, although there are worse things than Burger King.

I slept a couple of hours, but 'they' woke me up, as always, and the guy (his name was Barry Bartlett) slept out in my living room area, but he couldn't sleep very well, and he was mostly playing his music on his laptop. He got my music CDs when he was in the car and he loaded them onto his computer, and I don't mind, that's okay with me. So now he has some John Denver and Blondie songs that he likes, and he was playing them over and over. (He didn't get the electronic music, which was on the driver's side of the car, in the little pocket on my door, but he couldn't have played them anyway because they've gotten all scratched and they don't work anymore - I desperately need new CDs.)

Eventually I woke up, as I said, and I had to go out and talk to him. I was trying to accept this burden, imagining myself living with him long-term, for months or years. I imagined that I would be responsible for his food and his health and for entertaining him constantly, because he couldn't just calm down and quietly read a book or something. He would be someone who watches television constantly and has it turned up really loud. I can't stand television, especially LOUD television. Peter does that too, and it bothers me when I go over there, but I like Peter a lot more for other reasons and just in general. I don't have a TV, so Barry was bored, and he was going to be doomed to an eternity of boredom if he had to sit in my house doing nothing without a TV.

I spent all of Monday with Barry. I took him to Goodwill and was going to get him a couple items of clothing. But he refused to look at clothing. He told me to just get him something of a particular size. I can't do that. I can't know what kinds of things he likes or dislikes. I wanted to get him something that wasn't contaminated with tobacco and mystery-poison, whatever it is. But he wouldn't try on clothing - instead, he went to the gadgets section and wanted to buy a scanner. Not a scanner that scans photos for the computer, but a radio scanner, a police scanner that can listen to truck drivers on their CB radios and all that. It had a broken antenna, but he tested it and it still worked. I bought it for him. He never was able to get anyone to respond to him when he tried to talk, but he was able to occasionally hear them, so it was like the microphone didn't work anymore.

There were two incidents where he actually did scare me. He would often lie there on his blanket in the living room, holding his pair of pliers and just swinging the pliers so that they opened and closed, making a clicking noise, over and over. I started to feel scared that he was going to attack me with the pliers. The other incident was when I had explained to him (or, I tried to explain, but he interrupted me every couple words, so he never understood) that I was having a very bad mood because I didn't feel well, because I was sensitive to his tobacco, and he had been smoking in the car with me, and smoking outside the apartment (after I told him he had to smoke outside - he had smoked inside at first, without asking permission, and I saw him having a Tourette's twitch episode while holding a lit cigarette in his hand, and the sparks flew off the cigarette while his hand was jerking around, and I wondered if that was the reason why his house burned down), and also because he had hugged me and the residue went through my skin - I could feel the tingling sensation where it was on the skin of my chest. So I was very uncomfortable and sullen and quiet and unhappy. I apologized for being in a bad mood, and explained that it was my chemical sensitivity. He scared me by saying, 'Are you the same person? Or are you somebody else?' He spoke as though he literally believed that I was another person who looked exactly the same, but was a different person underneath, like an evil twin or a clone. That scared me - there was no logical way that I could prove I was the same person. I said, 'I'm the same person!' in a surprised, hurt tone of voice, and I felt scared. I tried to explain that it was just a very bad mood because I wasn't feeling well, but I was actually the same person.

So after spending a day with him, trying to get a few minutes alone here and there so I could think about what needed to be done, and having him knock on my door a couple times when I was alone, and begging to see my computers in the bedroom, begging to 'fix' my laptop because it was 'slow' even though I never told him anything was wrong with my laptop, and it doesn't have adware because it never touches the internet - after a day of all that, and his constant talking, I knew it would be impossible for me to help him. I couldn't do all of the things needed in my imaginary troubleshooting protocol, unless I had lots more help and resources than I have now. I would need other babysitters to cycle through the time spent with him, because everyone goes crazy after a couple hours of being with him. And he would have to agree to do the special diets and the decontamination and all that, when he might not want to. And this was all happening on Monday, which is my day of rest after working two jobs four days in a row.

So I asked him where he would like me to take him. I told him that I would need to take him someplace and let him go because I could only help him a little bit. He said, 'You're doing the wrong thing,' over and over, in a miserable way, and it made me start crying. (By now, I was seeing him in two different ways, two visions of him. I saw him as the annoying, intolerable person who exhausted me with his constant need for attention, but I also saw him as an older, much sicker, much more pitiful version of my favorite guy at work, the 'temporary workplace friend,' who also has a back injury from a car accident, if he were much more severely hyperactive (he's actually somewhat quiet, and gentle and pleasant to be around) if he were homeless and had been on drugs and in psychiatric hospitals and lost all his teeth and all his friends and family and his home - it broke my heart, to know he was a real person, somebody who could be loved and cared for, but I couldn't do it.) But he agreed to pack up his stuff and bring it back down to my car. We had put his blankets and clothes in the dryer because they'd gotten rained on, and after they were dry, we packed them all up. We put his bike into my trunk again, and his walker in the back seat with his bags.

So I took him back to Williamsport. He had left Williamsport for two reasons: One, he got thrown out of Wegmans for doing the same thing he did at McD - using his laptop and singing loudly. Two, he needed Vicoden, and the doctors wouldn't give it to him anymore, he said, so he was going to try the doctors in Harrisburg and see if they would give him Vicoden. But he decided to go back to Williamsport anyway, and that's good, because I wasn't really comfortable with the idea of driving around in Harrisburg on a day when I still felt tired and sick, with a guy who talked constantly.

I had accidentally taken the wrong highway and gotten on 180, not understanding that I could get there more easily by going on 220. So our trip was longer than it should have been. But we got there. I needed to go to a gas station, and he wanted to get some food with his food stamps card. I drank a Starbucks Coffee, for the first time in a couple months - I really did quit all coffee and all chocolate, but I felt tired enough that it might not be safe to drive home. Peter called me on my cell phone while we were still sittting next to the gas pump. I told him where I was and that I wouldn't be home for a while, but I'd go see him in a couple of hours. He didn't ask too many questions. I explained that I was taking a homeless man to Williamsport.

We found his street in Williamsport easily enough. He called his pastor on the phone - this was a church pastor that he only met last Wednesday. The guy didn't know him very well, but was trying to help him. It was the middle of the night, and Barry wanted to keep explaining everything over and over to the pastor on the phone, when he surely had been sleeping. So I whispered, 'hey - he needs to sleep, and I need to get home,' and luckily, Barry was able to wind down after a couple more tellings of the story, and was able to let the pastor go and say they'd talk sometime in the next couple days.

I let him out at a house by the church, and it looked like the house was sort of connected to the church - I'm not sure whether it was or not. There was a porch that he slept on, where he had a wheelchair that he used for putting his bags and stuff into. The wheelchair was there like he said it would be. We got all his stuff out of the car and I hugged him goodbye, but I wasn't crying anymore. I cried a few times after deciding that I would have to take him someplace and let him go. (By the way, I offered several times to take him to the homeless shelter, and I forgot to mention that earlier in the story, but he refused to go there - he said he got sick by being in an enclosed place with other homeless people, and I believed it - it's like going to the hospital and getting sick from BEING there, which has happened to many other people, including Peter. Barry said he got bronchitis because of the sick people in the homeless shelters, so he didn't want to go there anymore.) So he got out his blankets and got ready to sleep on that porch, and I got in my car and left. I took 220 home and it was faster.

I made it home and went straight to Peter's house. I felt like I didn't want to touch Peter, or he didn't want to touch me. I felt sick and miserable from the tobacco-mystery poison mix on Barry which was now all over me. I felt socially exhausted, too, from listening to someone who can't stop talking all day long. I felt violated and endangered, and regretted that I had brought Barry home with me - what if he had killed me, or raped me, or attacked me? I was mad at myself for having no boundaries and letting people in again, dangerous people, when I ought to have said no to them. I still felt a sense of Barry's presence. Sometimes 'they,' the voices, the attackers, do that to me - they force me to replay somebody's memory in my mind after I leave them, the same way that they force me to keep hearing a song that played on the Muzak at the stores and other public places, the songs I can't stand, the awful radio music that I've heard a million times and never liked to begin with. I couldn't just disconnect and forget him, and I think it was partly because of 'them,' but not entirely. I also felt that I had already hugged Barry too many times today, and like I didn't want to hug anybody anymore, because Barry had been touching me so much all day long, so I felt reluctant to touch Peter. (By the way, all of these bad feelings got much better after I got home, took a shower, got out of the contaminated clothes, and slept.)

So I told the story to Peter, and Peter expressed the same compassion I had when I told him about Barry going in and out of mental hospitals and being on drugs and all that. I stayed at Peter's house for a couple hours and mostly listened to him because he was in a bad mood, too, and wanted to rant about several problems having to do with his wife's job. He also told me some entertaining stories about what it used to be like working at McDonald's in the old days when the grills were different - you used to actually flip the burgers, when nowadays, there is a thing that closes down over top of them so that the top and bottom get cooked at the same time. He told me how they would put about a hundred burgers on the grill at once, and feed the college fraternities that would go there for the $0.59 burger deal. I also played solitaire on his computer and used the internet a little bit.

The next morning, I was talking to the voices when I woke up, and we were discussing what I needed to do to stop myself from doing these dangerous things over and over again. I occasionally picked people up and gave them rides in my car, or went on dates with guys I wasn't attracted to, or let homeless guys into my house, and so on, and I needed to make boundaries protecting me against doing those things. So I explained to the voices that I had been brainwashed into being a 'Yes Man' like the movie (or 'Yes Woman'). In the old days, I said 'no' to almost everyone, almost all the time. I didn't go on dates with random unattractive guys or anything. I didn't used to form friendships with some vague idea of 'social networking' with people whose values and beliefs were drastically different from my own. So I explained all that, and we made some rules for things that I am now officially forbidden to do.

I haven't even had a chance to talk about 'The Golden Compass' yet (the book is called 'Northern Lights' in Europe) which I've been reading - it's about mind control, or the slavery and murder of the spirit, and other things that are very similar to my everyday experiences, so I can relate to that book and I'm enjoying it a lot. I saw the movie first. I think I'll talk about it in a separate post. Enough for now...