5 Nov 2000

Dave Bird <dave@xemu.demon.co.uk>

PICKET 2000/Nov/05, Birmingham (UK).
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A few people were missing for health or work reasons. We discussed it 7--10 days before and decided to go ahead, and make the location Birmingham because it was due for another visit (fine for me, as no train travel to the demo). I was tied up a lot of Friday too. We met near the station and moved on to the bOrg, which is only 5 to 7 minutes away. We had Dave, Jens, Andy and Pam plus two of their sons, also local women Diane and Santosh. Jens set the boom box up and I started on the mic. There were almost eleven clams out to handle us, a record level, although I doubt they could have had prior notice... especially of the last minute choice of Birmingham rather than Brighton.

My handler appeared to be a tall googly-eyed individual with a slight twitch in a blue donkey-jacket marked "Birmingham University Loons Club" ...well, it might have been Lions (rugby-football ) club, but loons seemed more appropriate. He stopped a woman with a pram, stared at her with a fixed googly stare and twitched slightly then said "he's just come out of a lunatic asylum" (meaning me). I could see that she was really impressed by this, and quite eager to get away from her staring, twitching informant. His favourite trick was to stand about eighteen inches in front of me, but I would just say "ah, it's the birmingham university loons club again" and launch into remarks on that subject...

How Scientology was founded by a hack writer called ElRon Hubbard who was nuts, a paranoid schizophrenic who begged the veterans association to pay for his psychiatric treatment but they wouldn't. Any way, he wrote down a recipe on how to be insane --- how to gaze at people with a fixed stare, how to bend conversation and fake emotions to deliberately manipulate people, and so on -- he wrote it all down in books and called it Scientology. The he charged people money to learn it. And also, he took far too much cocaine and amphetamines, which made him even more paranoid: not just irritable with other people's behaviour but irritable with every little touch or itch on his skin, till he had cocaine bugs... delusions of little spiders or space aliens crawling over your skin. And he wrote this down too, called it O.T.3, and charged people money for it... for learning how to imagine cocaine bugs on their skin, and say to them "hello little cocaine bug, you are really a space alien who should go off on his own." And the cocaine bug says "you're right, VaRRRROM gaZooom" and you say "good-byeeeeeeeeeee!"; then we played the tape of Hubbard actually saying this later on. Loons club would get the twitches from hearing such things, and desperately dance off twenty or thirty feet away.

Santosh acquired a BT (Bum Thetan), a small Asian chap who constantly hovered about 15 inches behind her bum. "If you want great lager follow the bear" said I, and joined the conga with a swaying walk just fifteen inches behind him. "I don't want you following me around Dave" "well, Santosh doesn't want you following her round either." The clams had a blue and white "How toxic are you?" leaflet which we also parodied. "How stupid are you? Have you got more money than sense? Do you want to give the $cientology cult fifteen hundred pounds of your money? then just sign up over there..." A bunch of local teens wanted to join in and went on the mic saying "beware of the toxic people, they're after your money", also one of the girl's was trying to cadge "Xemu Jnr", Andy's five foot green inflatable alien, which stood in front of the boom-box.

We were a bit low on leaflets, only 4 or 500 between all of us and they soon went, but we lasted for a solid two hours 1300 - 1500 then down the pub for half an hour and on for a bit of food before proceeding home. All in all, not a bad day out at all.

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