Albin and the Brainwash Factory: The Forum
I met Albin in the early 90s, when he was in the middle of a Great Adventure. He had an old Honda 750, which he rode down from Washington State to San Diego as a kind of shakedown cruise for his main goal; riding it up the Alaska Highway. He came down to visit a friend of ours, Robyn. We hit it off in part because we both rode motorcycles.
Robyn was in the process of being processed into a mind control cult called The Forum. It is a very expensive way to learn to solve very simple problems, and courses she wanted cost hundreds of dollars.
She bribed us to attend an introductory lecture with a promise of fish tacos. We demanded the tacos in advance.
The Forum is the evolutionary product of EST; Warner Erhart's self improvement program that got so much bad press. Denying people permission to use the bathroom, mocking those who voiced anything but total agreement; EST received so much bad press that Erhart changed the name to stay in business. Erhart is a former Scientologist, who incorporated much of what he learned into his own group.
Albin and I rode up to Rancho Bernardo, where we collected our tacos from a Rubios before proceeding onward to our adventure with the brainwashing factory. We parked our motorcycles and swaggered in to be greeted by a woman with too much lipstick and a fake "Oh this house is perfect for you" real estate agent smile. She insisted upon nametags, so we gave her a couple of fake names to bear proudly for the duration.
Once our enthusiastic greeting was over, we were turned loose in the complex until the lecture started.
We spent our time making fun of their computer system. They didn't believe in directories, just threw everything in under C:\ with no organization.
When the lecture began, there were around twenty people in the folding chairs facing the stage. Turns out we were the only noobs in the room. The event began with various people standing up to give testimonials on how The Forum helped them. Albin and I did a lot of nudging and snickering, as these people had such tediously mundane, easily dealt with problems they saw as insurmountable without The Forum. We concluded that, anybody that inept and ineffective probably deserved to be separated from their cash, but we were gonna hold on to ours.
After the litany of Big Success Stories from the audience, the chairwoman got up to relate yet another stupid problem she had that The Forum had helped her solve. She told her story, then told the audience, "You may ack me now." They all applauded her. "Ack" is a term taken from Scientology, that means to acknowledge. It's one of the buzz words used by The Forum as well.
The meeting almost over, the woman focused on us, asking me what problems I thought The Forum could help me with. I said, in all honesty, that I didn't have problems in my life that I couldn't handle on my own, and that I thought what they seemed to perceive as problems were, in fact, minimal and insignificant.
At this point, the meeting broke up, paying members went one way, while we were directed to a little room with folding chairs and a chalkboard. No way were we about to go in there for the big sales push!
I wanted a cigarette, so I asked if I could smoke in there. As expected, it was not allowed. So I asked if we could "do this outside." That, too, was not allowed. So, Albin and I stepped out into the parking lot. As soon as the side door closed, we ran around the building, jumped on our motorcycles, and rode away giggling.
We had a lot of fun during his visit to San Diego, but all too soon it was time for him to head off on his great Alaskan adventure. While on the road, he sent out email alerts about his adventures.
Bikeabout was a great series about riding an old Honda up the gravel highway into the heart of Alaska. He noted that the only bikes who made it were BMW GS dirtbikes, the Harleys often broke down on the road. He encountered bears, and had to rebuild his motor in a Quonset hut set up for truck repair. By the time the snow was really flying, he was home.
He posted his many adventures later in his blog pages, which can still be read here:
Albin and Brother Mustafa
When Albin moved to Florida to take a job keeping the computers running at the University of Miami, he hated it. Having spent a great deal of his young adult life in the Everglades, he hated what Florida had become; overdeveloped, riddled with crime, dying. So, he took every opportunity he could to come out to California and visit.
Robyn wasn't doing too well. She'd been mindfucked by The Forum, and was applying what she'd learned. On Albin. Her great plan was for Albin to move out to Cali, share a house where he could pay the rent so she wouldn't have to. This is a common tactic for both The Forum followers as well as Scientologists. They are told not to take no for an answer, so she pestered Albin relentlessly.
And so it was that Albin flew out to California without telling her. He simply didn't want her bugging him for a week or so. He arrived at my downtown loft with six bottles of Captain Morgan's Coconut Rum, which was unavailable on the west coast. It was all duct taped into a package like a suitcase. Albin had priorities. His other possessions were stuffed into a backpack.
I had two motorcycles at the time, so we took some rides into the back country in between sessions of swilling rum and drinking giant cans of Fosters. My friend Todd rode down from San Francisco, and we all three took a ride up into the mountains to Julian. We stopped at the Rongbranch Saloon for lunch, where we heard of a tragedy that killed any hiking up the mountain plans we'd been kicking around. A local had been killed by lightning on top of Stonewall Peak the previous day, as he held on to the metal railing along the trail.
Back home at the loft, Foster's Mountain grew taller as we stacked the large cans on my kitchen floor.
After a week, Albin reluctantly decided it was time to let Robyn know he was in town. Boy, was she pissed!
When Robyn drove down from Escondido to visit unannounced, she barged in my front door to deliver a speech which she'd obviously rehearsed. Adopting the valence of "angry," she read Albin and me the riot act for not letting her know he was in town. Then she started in on him, demanding again that he move in with her and pay the rent. This kind of crap just rolled off Albin, it didn't bother him.
Then she started bugging us to help her get "Brother Mustafa" out of her house. She'd befriended this guy, let him crash on her couch, and he just...stayed. She was living in a crappy little unit in a crappy little part of Escondido; full of tweakers, dopers, tramps and thieves. We took a ride up to her place. Brother Mustafa was a scruffy black guy full of sharing and brotherhood. Well, as long as the sharing flowed his direction, that is. We both talked to him, telling him Robyn wanted him out. He got quite angry, but finally took off when we threatened to call the cops on his sorry, couch-dwelling, fridge-looting, rent-avoiding ass. Fun, that wasn't.
We noticed a strange thing about Robyn. When she was using The Forum tactics, she seemed to snap into a different personality. Then she'd become the person we were familiar with. This has been observed with Scientologists as well, the behavior modification imposed seems to install a default cult personality that suppresses the individual's real self. It was obnoxious and rather unpleasant to see, so we tried to avoid her whenever possible.
Albin and the Mexican Piss Hat
One day, we took the trolley down to the border and walked across to explore Tijuana. Fifty cent beers, cheap tacos and leather goods, interesting arts and crafts made Mexico a fun way to spend a day. Albin found a great black leather hat. It was a broad-brimmed flat topped hat that looked very good on him, so he bought it. It became his favorite hat until it got wet. Then it began to smell of urine, and his forehead broke out in little itchy blisters. It turns out that a lot of Mexican leather uses urine in the tanning process. We dubbed it the Mexican Piss Hat, and he threw it away. The Mexican Piss Hat became a metaphore for something that isn't what it seems. The Mexican Piss Hat looked like a hat, but it wasn't. You couldn't use it as a hat because it stank like pee and made you break out. Scientology is a Mexican Piss Hat. It's not what you think it is.
The Pigeon Shooters
The last time Albin visited, he'd moved back to Washington State, to his mother's house in the Bavarian town of Leavenworth. He became active in fighting the wave of development that threatened to destroy the rural feel of a mountain village. He grew flowers, and made alcoholic beverages out of the various fruit from the trees in the back yard. He put up a bird feeder, and reported the various birds, including hawks, that visited his yard.
I moved from the downtown loft to a 2 bedroom house a couple miles east of downtown San Diego. I didn't see Albin for a few years; by the time he came down again I had quite a nice garden set up. A potted Ficus tree had escaped and grown into a nice shade provider. A defunct Christmas tree had also escaped, making a nice screen from morning sun. Albin came down from Nevada after visiting Burning Man. He had an old Datsun pickup truck with a camper shell and a mattress, which was much more comfortable than my fold out sofabed.
We would spend mornings sitting in the garden, drinking coffee. We spent our afternoons sitting in the garden drinking beer. The pigeons had discovered the bird feeder, which was a problem. They drove the other birds away. However, my friend Red had given me a spring-loaded Airsoft pistol, which shoots little plastic balls. The pigeons were fair targets, and we spent a lot of time whacking them with the gun. It wouldn't hurt them, a hit pigeon would take off, followed by the others, but they'd quickly return.
Over time, the pigeons became wary, and made our fun more challenging. Rather than bump and hustle around on the ground, they started lining up on the roof, watching for a chance to descend. We took to picking them off the roof line. They moved around the corner of the house. We had to stalk them to get a shot, crawling along the walkway concealed by the back porch steps. They finally settled on the roof of the apartments behind the yard, where they were out of range of the Airsoft projectiles. However, there were still enough stupid pigeons to provide us with targets!
There was a lot going on in the garden. A semi-tame scrub jay had decided to sponge peanuts and mealworms from the yard hominids, providing lots of entertainment. He was off-limits for the Airsoft pistol, and would cheekily land on one's knee to demand a treat.
One afternoon, we noticed a drift of feathers wafting down from above. We looked up to see a Merlin plucking a small goldfinch. Merlins are not common backyard falcons, so it was a real treat to see one perched on the neighbors' TV antenna.
I had to laugh at Albin's wizard costume. He wore it all around at Burning Man, and got some odd responses. On his first day, a Jewish lady pointed him out to her kid and said in a loud New York accent, "Oh, look...it's Moses!
Albin had already had a bout with the blood disorder, so his energy wasn't what it used to be. Still, on the day of the Summer Solstice, we joined my friends for our annual celebration at Torrey Pines State Beach. That's where I took my favorite picture of him; sitting on a rock on the beach, gazing west to the ocean.
Goodbye, Albin. You were a good friend, a lot of fun, and I will miss you.
