But I almost believe we are ghosts . . . It's not only what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that keeps on returning in us. It's all kinds of old dead doctrines and opinions and beliefs, that sort of thing. They aren't alive in us; but they hang on all the same, and we can get rid of them. I just have to pick up a newspaper, and it's as if I could see the ghosts slipping between the lines. They must be haunting our whole country, ghosts everywhere--so many and thick, they're like grains of sand. And there we are, the lot of us, so miserable afraid of the light.
-Ibsen

8:46 AM Wednesday, June 19.

 Manchester Beach

 Into Booneville today, poke around, maybe find a ghost town, wander back into SF for a performance Jon's going to give tonight at Sacred Grounds; stay at Jon's place tonight and then it's on to Santa Barbara inland, San Diego, then back up the coast via Route One.

Flashback: Well we're finally at the GROUP SEX WITH OUR CLOTHES ON part of the story. Forgive me if it's a tad on the anti-climatic side. Here it is: Every hour or so our group stands up joins hands and chants in unison: CHOO-CHOO-CHOO CHOO-CHOO-CHO CHOO-CHOO-CHOO BANG POW! Jon and I hypothesize that this is the only vehicle that the church allows for sexual release, and all of the Moonies get into it big time, especially the aforementioned drone couple, with the POW providing embarrassing displays of orgasmic pleasure, which we all get to share (GROUP SEX) with our clothes on (WITH OUR CLOTHES ON. Told'ja it was anti-climatic.

At night, before they put us to bed in the chicken coop, they gather us together in front of the fireplace for a good-night chat. They ask us to think long and hard about what we had learned that day and to pray to God for his guidance in deciding the paths that our lives would now take. Finally, they issued a challenge: they called it Jump Starting. Jump Starting involves leaping up out of bed at dawn, the minute you hear the straining strains of Theo's pop cheese toast. Jon's intrigued; he vows that he will win the next morning's Jump Start. (Hey, I wonder if Jon ever won any perfect attendance ribbons?)

We curl up on the coop floor and go to sleep. Someone comes in late from San Francisco (much like we did) and the noise wakes Jon up; he thinks that it's was Tony Orlando and Dawn--I'm sorry, strike that, I mean Theo and Dawn, and so explodes out of his sleeping bag ready to collect the trophy for his Jump Start victory; only to realize that it's the middle of the fucking night. Jon groans and collapses back into his sleeping bag mumbling and muttering to himself something about perfect attendance ribbons or some such thing. When Theo and Dawn finally do arrive, Jon refuses to budge; he complains about the false alarm of the previous night.

You'll never guess who won the Jump Start challenge. Yep, yours truly. Only I didn't jump up; I stood up, slowly, reluctantly, only when I realized that Theo wasn't going to stop playing Cat-Fucking-Stevens until somebody got up. Hey, that's just the kind of guy I am!

I do have to admit one thing about the Unification Church. Dinners were wonderful, in great long table fashion, with mouth-watering sautéed fish and lots of fresh vegetables. Everyone was asked to get up and perform something; Jon and I, with Jim on guitar, got up and did Neil Young's "I am child" which is just a tad too consanguineous with church doctrine for my taste, so I'm just going to pretend that it didn't happen. I sat next to the big hitter (head guy, with a cough syrup flowing voice which hid a rapier tongue) at the head of the table (wanted to keep his eye on me?) who asked me, "How's the man from New Hampshire tonight?" Reminds me of the practice that the Moonies insisted on when you met people from the first time: "Hi, I'm Bob, Texas, Hi, I'm Duane, Minnesota, Hi, I'm Starprotoplasm, California." I wanted to say "Hi, I'm Mac, Mr. New Hampshire 1980" but couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger.

Jon and I'd been on the road for a couple of days without a shower so by the second day of our long weekend, we were ripe and ready for a shower; they told us that we could use the shower, but inexplicably just kept putting us off. When they finally did let us use the shower, there was no hot water; we notified them of this fact and they said to just stick it out, the hot water usually took a while to arrive; it never did. I was told subsequently by someone that much of what I've described to you concerning our experiences with the Unification Church falls under the category of classic methods of brainwashing: Hi-protein diet, cold showers, complete isolation from society, creating complete dependence for all important functions, sleep deprivation, etc..

 When Jon and I told them that we wanted to leave, they tried to split us up--you see they wanted Jon, bad, real bad; almost as bad as they wanted to get rid of me--but Jon and I refused to be separated. They suggested, to Jon mostly, that maybe we had reached a point in our lives when it was better if we went different directions. They tried everything and refused to accept that our decision to leave was final, emphasizing that the door was still open, but they finally did confess that there was a van heading back to San Fran the next day. Jon and I vowed that we were going to be on it.

 Flashforward: we're both sitting in the Horn o Zeese Coffee shop in "downtown" Booneville. It's 12:13 PM. It's another beautifully sunny day. Our on the road non-precipitation streak is still going. Jon and I traveled over 5000 miles 15 years ago without a single drop of rain or snow falling on our head (for real!). I have no idea what this means . . . We just completed a sweep of the surrounding hills, and asked a couple of folks if they know where The Unification Church's farm is. As of yet, no luck. Jon's going to ask a real estate agent whose office we saw down the road.

 Got the address; we should be there in a minute!

 Well, 15 years later we finally took the church up on their invitation to come back whenever we wanted: 1:45 PM, Booneville, The Farm. What I'm about to tell you is absolutely true: The Farm . . . it's a ghost town. If you don't believe me, check out the pictures in the ghost gallery.

 Flashback: Monday morning there's a soccer game; just out of the blue a soccer game; purely coincidental, ignoring that Jon had mentioned on several occasions his love of soccer. What do you know, we mention that we want to leave and suddenly a soccer game breaks out.

 It's a great game, played on the early morning dewlapped fields with many smiles and go get'em fervor; during the game, out of the corner of my eye I notice that I woman I had talked to the previous night, who said that she was heading back to SF the next day, is walking up the road away from the farm with a handful of other people; I call her exit to Jon's attention; Jon assures me that the van certainly wouldn't leave without us, that certainly someone would inform us of inevitable departure; we ask Jim, who has just scored a goal while Jon and I are standing around, if the van is leaving; in the glow of his recent happy-faced accomplishment he makes a serious miscalculation: he doesn't dissemble; he gives us the first straight answer we've had since hooking up on the lunar shuttle (see Moonies). "Yes, the van's leaving, it's going into town."

 Jon and I bolt back to the coop for our stuff; we look up from harried packing to see Jim, standing in the doorway.

 "Are you guys leaving."

 "Yeah." Jim watches us silently as we finish packing. He looks lost. We're ready to go: Is jentle Jim going to try and block our path? Jentle Jim? [To this day I don't know if he was considering it or not.] Jon takes a Neil Young button off his pack and gives it to Jim as something to remember us by, and asks him:

 "How long you been here, Jim?"

 "Oh, I don't know; a couple months . . . a year."

 "A year?"

 "Maybe two."

 "Jim, you gotta get out here man, this place isn't for you."

 "Yeah, maybe." Jim looks at the Neil Young button in his hands. "Who'sis?"

 "That's Neil Young, Jim, the guy whose song we sang together last night at dinner, you know, I am a child?"

"Cool . . . maybe they'll let me keep it then." Jim steps out of our way.

 During one of the classes we were all asked to imagine what animal we would be and why. Jon chose a lion: I chose a centaur; Jim chose a fly, until we expressed so much displeasure with such a self-denigrating choice that he changed it, reluctantly, to a deer. Jim, a warm, gentle, quiet, young man, is precisely the kind of quarry the Unification Church catches up in their web and preys upon: young, vulnerable, lost and scared. Seems to me that in some sense this describes most of us. Thoughts?

 Flashforward: The Real Estate agent told us right where to go; I don't know why but I was frightened as I pull back the gate so Jon can drive through. We find someone in a trailer on the top of a ridge, Gerald, and Jon lays it on thick with smile talking smooth charm in that way that only Jon can manage, so thick and chewy that he's got to be on the level cause someone not on the level would dare to spread in so goopy thick; not Jon, man, that dude's got no fear when it comes to talking: he'll say anything, they're just words after all, and what are words but wind, and everybody breaks wind once and a while. Technically we're invited guests.

 Flashback: Standing outside of the van saying good-bye to Barbara (one of the head web-slingers), she says to us (Jon really), that just because we were leaving that didn't mean that we couldn’t come back, anytime. Jon replies, prophetically:

 "Who knows, maybe we will."

 I correct him during the van ride into town: "Maybe you will, but not me, man, I'm never going back to that place."

 Flashforward: But he's right: here we both sit, at the Farm. The trailers are familiar in their placement, but not in their condition: they're coming apart at the seams. Gerald says that the local kids keep breaking in and vandalizing the buildings. Jon and I wonder: random teenage pranksterism or do is the condition of the farm a reflection of the church's relationship with the town and the kids are picking up on that somehow? Anybody out there know?

 Everything's smaller than I remember it. Why is that always so. I mean it makes sense that the places we remember from childhood are all smaller, cause we were smaller and it makes sense that everything seems bigger. But I was 18 yrs. old when I first visited the Farm. I've decided that it's because my world view was severely limited to say the least. Rural boy from a small New Hampshire town, in which only one minority represented--a mulatto family that had a pair of twins that went to school with Jon and I and who, except for their afros, fit into the fabric of our community every bit as much as or better than Jon and I did. We check out the chicken coop, the shower stalls where we almost went hypothermic due to the liquid ice coming out of the shower heads, to the outrageous chanting of some rube with a southern accent: "You guys 're crazy . . . you guys . . . you guys 're crazy!"

 I find the spot by the tree where I first constructed my syllogism on the beauty of garbage; it's overgrown with tall, dry grass.

 The hills have remained the same, rolling with burnt grass, waving in breeze, spotted with pockets of lush green. They're beautiful, peaceful.

 I can't describe how I feel. Sad I guess would be a close approximation. I've carried an intense disdain for this place with me for well on 15 yrs., but I take no joy in its dilapidation. For like it or not, this place is a part of me, a part of my past, a ghost.

 I wonder why I was so adamant back then. What was I scared of? I was scared of an oversimplified world view; I was scared of phony camaraderie; I was scared of letting down my cynical guard, even for a minute; I guess you could say I still am; but I don't have any disdain for those people anymore, for these people, for Gerald or Jim or Barbara or Theo, though I'm sure that my logs have made a liar of me. Let's just say that these journals have allowed me to cathartically release all of that. Lets face it, those people, these people, people are just like you and me, just looking for a warm fire to come in out of the cold. And who can blame us? Who?

 Back in Guerneville; Jon left behind a computer cord that allows us to download bit-maps to our web page. Well, how about this for krazy karmic balance: I must of dropped my wallet when I changed from jeans to shorts at the gate to the Farm. So we gotta go back; it's 3:27 PM.

 Lost my wallet, all my money, credit card. Great day ends on a sad note. Tune in tomorrow to find out just how sad.

 With a heavy heart,

 Mac Pilsner