Life is so peculiar. I needed some sudden car repairs and ended up at Walmart. Not usually my first choice but they were close when the need arose. They told me it would be two hours and I thought, "Great! What am I going to do for two hours?"

Well, the question was answered when I walked out the front door and found two tables set up for stress tests. I sat down and grabbed the e-meter and was asked to think of a name of someone who caused me stess. Well, I had to confess that the needle moved when I thought of L. Ron Hubbard. I'm bad at hiding the truth.

This led me to ask some questions about Hubbard which the pretty girls allowed the lone, older male to answer. Turns out Hubbard was an engineer and a scientist who funded his research with his voluminous writing of fiction. I got him to admit that at least the first two weren't true. Then one of the woman took over (who I will randomly call Mary Sue for the sake of the story) and told me that the manager had approved them being there. So I had to go talk to the manager.

The manager was a nice guy who told me three other people had complained. One woman said she had lived in Clearwater and was so afraid of Scientology that she had to move. But the mananger said they were working in a loophole in that they were only selling Dianetics and there was nothing about religion being mentioned. By then, Mary Sue was worried about my whereabouts and came to find me speaking with the manager. She wanted to assure him that everything was fine and I was a mere kook.

I asked her to bring in a copy of Dianetics and she went and retrieved one. I thought there would be some mention of other Scientology publications in the ads at the back of the book . There were none. BUT...I had been explaining to the manager, in Mary Sue's absence, that the e-meter was a religious artifact and it was being used out front at the tables. When I mentioned this to Mary Sue, she was outraged. She said she had never heard of such a thing.

I asked her why I had heard of it and she hadn't...or was she just not telling the truth? I explained the history of the 1963 FDA raids and how each e-meter had to have a sticker on it saying it was a religious artifact and was not to be used for medical purposes. She said, "I have entensive knowlege of this material and I have never read anything about this."

The glorious thing is that while I was explaining all of this, the manager looked at the first page in the book and had been reading the printed disclaimer. "It's right here," he said. "The e-meter is a religious artifact." The woman was dumbfounded. I said to her, "I thought you were familair with this material." Then I asked the manager, "How long did it take you to find that out?" "Two minutes," he replied. I said to the woman, "So it took him two minutes and we're to honestly believe you weren't aware of that fact?'

The manager also saw the copyright belonging to Scientology and told her that this changed things. He had to call his corporate office and tell them this new wrinkle but was still going to wait to see what they would say. Mary Sue went back outside and I shared some more info with the manager who promised to do some research on the web.

Next I went outside and sat on the bench next to their tables. I thought it was a shame I didn't have a picket sign so I went inside and bought a large tablet of art paper and a black marker and went back to the bench and printed a "XENU.NET" sign to hold up. When some of the girls moved in front of me to block the sign I stood up and decided to counter some of their sales pitches. My most common one was in response to their "Free Stress tests" call. I would follow it with "Nothing is free in Scientology. Dianetics is Scientology. Beware Scientology."

This led to the girls shouting louder and louder to try to drown me out. This went on for about an hour and a half. I tried to remain cordial even when the lone guy in the group was calling me a "fat fuck" and telling me to "get the fuck out of here." I simply pointed out that the wog world was at cause over him.

I saw one person buy a book during my time there. I gave him a handwritten piece of paper torn from the art book and asked him to look at xenu.net when he got home. This went along with my slogan, "xenu.net...crashing stats since 5:30." Okay, that one was only meant for the body routers.

All good thing must come to an end so as my car was repaired, I decided to head home.

This is true.

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