Oliver Benjamin
The flyer was an invitation to a meditation seminar thrown by
the Juddhists. I watched the blonde as she tried to rally the rest of the
sleeping dead and searched the corners of my memory, now worn
smooth, for any hint of where I might have met her.
I put my head back down in the sand and it suddenly came to
me—the boat! She was one of Oscar’s new hippie friends! Maybe that
was what happened to blasphemous little Oz—he had gotten sucked
into this Juddhist cult! Sure, he seemed too intelligent for such
nonsense, but if you take a starving man and dangle nourishment in
front of him he’ll believe anything. That was it, I decided, I was going
to the meditation session to rescue my heretic friend. At the very
least, I would get a free vegetarian meal and a good laugh.
I showed up at the dilapidated old bamboo shack around seven p.m.
Waiting outside were the requisite spiritual experimentalists, willing
to try anything that sounded both exotic and environmentally safe. I
joined them in discussing how cool it was to be so open-minded, and
how everyone else in the world wasn’t.
“Oh, crystals are just so…so…You know, like…whoa. Just, whoa.
Know what I mean?” said the short girl from Oregon who had more
rings in her nose than Liberace had on his fingers.
“Yeah. Whoa,” I added. Suddenly, an ordinary looking guy
wearing a T-shirt that said SAVE YOURSELFon it opened the door
of the shack and ushered everyone inside. We were instructed to sit
on the bamboo mats on the floor in a cross legged position. I cased
the place and saw the fat blonde girl and her friend from the boat, but
there was no sign of Oscar. Disappointed, I nevertheless decided to
stay to see what this meditation stuff was all about. The ordinary
looking guy lit a few candles and some incense and sat down, lotus
style, in front of the group. He had a syrupy voice that, like syrup,
provided plenty of sweetness but little nourishment.
“We-ll-come friends,” he drawled, “to the fourth Juddhist
meditation seminar. We have some new friends with us tonight, and
I thought we’d start the session by having them introduce themselves
to us. You there in the back, why don’t you start by telling us your
name, where you come from and a little bit about why you came
here.” He pointed to a small curly-haired man that seemed to be in
his fifties.
“My name is Oogle, and I coming from Sveden. I come here for
free meal. Sank you.”
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