This guy was huge, not exactly fat, not exactly muscular, but huge, in a strong and roly poly way. He came strolling down the aisle to the front of the church, with a big meaty red face, a bright red shirt, and spotless white dockers. He plunked down in the second or third row from the front, and sat there smiling, his smile almost filling his entire huge face.
My wife and I were sitting in the row behind him, but on the far side of the pew (he sat near the middle aisle, while we were on the outside left of the church, near the front). He glanced back directly at me and nodded and smiled with such a look that I though I must know him, or at least had met him sometime before, and it seemed he remembered me a lot more than I remembered him.
When the time came for everyone to get up and greet a few people, I walked straight over to him, and he turned immediately to meet me. This was odd for me, as I'm highly introverted, and generally people must come to me. But something compelled me to go to him, and he was ready. He grabbed my hand with his big beefy hand and our hands seemed the same size and strength. At the time I was about 36 or 37, and this big guy must have been about 55 or so, with a mop of very white hair and white eyebrows.
He started talking, to me what seemed impossibly fast. Some of the most rapid-fire speech I've ever heard. And yet, as I stood there with my head tilted, trying to listen and absorb as much as possible, it seemed I could clearly hear everything this guy was rattling off. And it wasn't the kind of stuff a stranger usually began to spew in church. It's all a blur now, but I met him after church and he gave me the same rapid-fire treatment, but at least allowed me to get in a few questions, which he'd answer in a machine-gun rattle of high-powered free-flow and free-form speech.
Here is an example of some of the stuff he said, and I'll do a one-byte paragraph -- this all crammed into about 30 seconds of time, in one huge breath -- but keep in mind, this guy didn't seem crazy (well, a lot of the stuff seemed crazy, and I do tend to draw the fringe thinkers and conspiracy nuts, but he seemed completely rational, like a third-grade school teacher telling a quick list of how his day goes, only you find he's telling you about a classroom of albino children with two heads each, all of them mindreaders, and these kids are going to take over the world -- is this guy a nut? Or a genius with a paradigm microscope that is picking up details on reality that you never thought plausible, let alone possible).
"It's all happening now, it's all clicking into place, everything, no one can see it right now but it is spinning out of control, all the key elements are snapping together and you can almost audibly feel it, it's all around you, the cell phone usage, that will continue to expand, rapidly, they'll want to get everyone in America on a cellphone, everyone, and Aspartame, sneaking Aspartame and other similar mind-control chemicals into everything you eat and drink, because the Coven is tightening their grip, they are moving forward now at an incredible pace because they know their time is short, and if you're not careful you will not see it happening, it will all seem normal including the laws that clench down on civilians as the Government takes more power for itself, as citizens lose all their rights to privacy or individual thought."
That's kind of a cumulation of the kind of stuff he was telling me. And he was telling me this stuff as lightly as if we were discussing the weather, he kept his voice low and personal, he met my eyes, eye-to-eye, and he didn't seem to need to look away or hardly breathe. And something, an overwhelming sensation of compulsion, told me to listen, listen carefully, take in as much as possible. Another part of me, of course, was screaming: "This guy is a nutcase, watch out!"
One of my traits is that I tend to talk on the slow side, mainly because my mind is going so fast it is difficult for my lips to keep pace, and if I talk any faster my tongue and lips will start clashing and tripping over each other -- unless I get upset, or angry, and then of course more instinct than mind takes control, and my speech can get very fast. This guy was completely calm, and the things he was saying, though they sounded ridiculous, were spoken in such a calm and rational way that it created an almost supernatural sense of drama.
I finally broke in and said: "So exactly what is this all doing, what does Aspartame and cell phones have to do with each other?"
"It's mind control, subtle mind control that no one notices, as both Aspartame and cell phones were designed specifically to create tumors, generally benign tumors, in the brain. I was a chemist working for the Government on this project, and we specifically tested chemicals to find a way to slowly, subtly replace healthy brain cells with useless matter, tumors, clusters of tumors, so that people will slowly begin to lose their ability to make decisions, to think clearly, to see behind the issues, to make rational decisions even on important issues, so that people will lean more and more upon others to make the necessary decisions for them."
He rattled out different chemical equations and combinations and alternative names for Aspartame and launched into a diatribe about the different waves and rays that are constantly ripping through the atmosphere, most of which I could never remember or distinguish fact from fantasy, but he was saying all this in an authoritative way, as if all this were true to him, and he needed to tell certain people.
In a period of about 10 minutes he told me that he was on the run, that he used to be wealthy, that a Coven was running America, and the world, that such people as Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw were high in the echelons of this Coven of Witchcraft, that the media was locked into this elite body, he mentioned the Illuminati, and that the media was feeding the civilian the "necessary" information.
After a while he thanked me for listening to him, shook my hand in his big paw, and then smiling, walked away.
On the drive home I jokingly told Carolena that maybe this guy was an angel! She thought he was just a crazy guy.
But in the ensuing years I've wondered, because when he told me this stuff about cell phones, I had never heard anything of the kind, but instinctively I knew to use them only in emergency situations, not as a chatting instrument. My body could feel the negative rays shooting into my head, very similar to standing in front of a microwave oven while it's running. I had already heard the negative side to Aspartame and had never desired to use THAT, just a small taste of it makes your body scream that this is worse than any caffeine or sugar. And cell phone usage has exploded -- there is a distinct push to convince everyone to abandon conventional phones, "git yer hole family on this inixpinsive plan, you kin talk a 1000 minutes a day!" And Aspartame, despite the obvious health dangers -- it is increasing, not decreasing.
This happened a few years before the movie "The Matrix" appeared at theaters, and when I first saw it, a lot of bells rang (bells related to this "crazy guy" and also to many other things). Reality is far different than what most people imagine.
Angel or crazy man?
