Chapter X: Men in White
(Febuary 2005 - June 2005)

"There is another unusual feature of [mental disorders] that should give us pause: they are typically treated without the patient's consent; and indeed the 'treatments' are often physically identical to what would in a non-medical context be called punishments."
-Setting The World To Rights

I returned to Colorado right at the very beginning of Febuary. I wasn't actually able to go HOME though as I was still stuck dealing with a few very annoying and pointless things that some very stupid people had decided needed to be done before anyone could go home. It was going to be a few more days but I didn't know how long for sure. At the first pay phone I could get access to I called Zion to tell him I was back but that he wouldn't be able to reach me for a few more days. When I called he didn't anwser, which wasn't really a suprise. He was back in class by now right? Very busy and all I was sure. I simply left a message and said I would call him back once I was fianlly home and could talk again. And I said I wanted to hear all the crazy stories that had happened while I was gone that we didn't want to have to explain to my friend "Bill" or "Bob" or whatever his name was, ha ha.

And so for a few more days I played the stupid mind games with the stupid people as if I actually cared what they thought. Eventually I said goodbye to my friends who I had adventured on the far side of the world with and was able to head home. When I got there calling Zion to let him know I was finally home again was the first thing on my to do list. Again, there was no anwser. But no big deal right? I left another message and moved on with my list of things to do, which was quite long. I had been gone a long time and now that I was back I had a lot of other things to worry about besides Zion. If that lazy bum couldn't even be bothered to anwser his phone then I would just leave it to him to call ME when he finally checked his messages.

But a week went by.

And then another.

Where the HELL was Zion!? I couldn't figure out what was taking him so long to call me back and having knocked a few other items off my to do list, I decided that maybe the best way to handle this situation was the old fashioned way. And of course the "old fashioned way" was to call every hour, on the hour and leave messages demanding that Zion anwser his phone under threat of very bad things happening if he didn't. Maybe I would start talking about Vampires again as that always seemed to make him nervous for some reason. Or alteast it would annoy him into calling me back to threaten me by claiming he would have to start talking about UFOs again. And being that getting him to call me back was the real objective, I would be just fine with that even if it meant having to hear him make up some non-sense about UFOs just because he thought it might annoy me. After about 20 or 30 messages I figured I had made my point and let this time honored tradition take care of the rest for me.

But another week went by and still nothing.

Finally one day I get a call from a pay phone in an area code I've never seen before. I anwser it and it turns out to be Zion, who I demand explain what the hell is going on right away. Zion blurts out right away that he is in a mental hospital and they wouldn't let him have his cell phone so it took him awhile to get his messages. They finally let him have his phone for a few minutes just to check his messages and now he had to call me back on the pay phone in the hospital. I obviously wanted to know how he had ended up in a mental hospital. So Zion told the tale...

To hear Zion tell the story, the whole thing was a HUGE misunderstanding. Zion said that he had been having insomnia for about two weeks(Make note of that, its important later) and couldn't sleep well at night. So he had been taking walks around the Amherst campus on nights when he wasn't able to sleep. But Amherst like any center of "higher education" is really just a place for horny kids to get in trouble, so the campus police were always on the look out for sexual predators lurking around the campus late at night. And in their mind anyone lurking around the campus late at night was probably up to no good. So on one of his late night walks Zion was stopped by the campus police who demanded he return to his dorm. Zion refused claiming it was his right to walk around if he pleased. But the campus police kept following him and called for backup. Eventually Zion found himself cornered in the foyer of the library but unable to get inside due to the inner doors being locked and unable to leave due to the polcie blocking his path.

Now, keep in mind Zion's story is based on the assumption that he wasn't thinking straight due to all the stress he was under (for reasons mentioned in the previous chapters) and the fact that he hadn't been able to sleep for several days. So Zion argued that he made the mistake at this point of trying to fight with the police and that it wasn't his fault because he wasn't thinking clearly at the time. Of course, in Zion's version of the story he claimed that he actually proformed rather well in the fight and managed to badly injure several of the campus police men. If you choose to believe that perticular detail or not is up to you but do keep in mind that Zion did have a tendancy to alter his stories to make himself look better (as pointed out back in chapter one) so I personally tend to take that part of the story with a very large grain of salt. The fight itself however was not really the point of the story, it was the concequences of the fight that was relevant to the tale. As Zion told it, the state of Massachusetts had a law that if someone resisted arrest they were supposed to be turned over to a mental hospital for an evaluation. Even though the Police Academy drop-outs working for Amherst weren't real police, they turned Zion over to the real police who then proceeded to turn him over to the mental hospital as per the law in Massachusetts.

And so, Zion argued, the whole thing was just a huge misunderstanding that never would have happened if the campus police weren't so paranoid as to assault someone just taking a walk. Although his story sounded like he may have left out a few details, I accepted Zion's story as it sounded plasuable enough to be true and he probably didn't have time to tell me the whole thing over a pay phone (plus, not knowing who might have been listening in on our conversation it is possible that certain details were intentionaly left out of the story). I moved on and asked Zion what would happen to him now and if there was any way that I could help. Zion thanked me for the offer but said there was probably nothing I could do. He also seemed optimistic that things were going to work out on their own. He said his sister was there at Amherst to help him and that his mother had also flown out to Massachusetts to help get the entire thing sorted out. He said it was looking like he would be released in just a few more days and then he would be coming home to Denver again. I was a bit suprised by that part and asked if Amherst had kicked him out as a result of the incident. His anwser was a bit ambagious, indicating that he could go back but that it wouldn't be a good idea for some reason. I assumed this was possibly another deatil he couldn't fully explain at the time and just thought I would ask about it when he got back. So we said goodbye and the conversation ended.

Then it was back to waiting again. I expected to hear from Zion again after about a week. But a week went by and I had not heard from him again yet. He said it would only be a few days until he got released and then came back to Denver, so why hadn't he shown up by now?

As before, it was another few weeks before he finally turned up again. I received another call from a pay phone but this time I did know the area code: It was in Denver somewhere. I anwsered and sure enough it was Zion again.

Unfortunately he was in another mental hospital! And he claimed it was another horrible misunderstanding. His claim that these incidents were just misunderstandings was starting to become a little less believable now that it had happened a second time, but I still asked what happened and listened to the story. Zion said that he had in fact gotten home right around the time I was expecting him to but that before he could do anything his parents began laying down all these outrageous "non-negotiable" rules they expected him to follow from now on. The most offensive of these for Zion was that he wasn't allowed to drive anymore. In Zion's defense, That does seem to be a rather bizzare rule as I can't think of any logical reason why he wouldn't have been able to drive. Even if you beleived he was crazy at this point, crazy people can still drive. It wasn't like he was blind or drunk. So the only reason I can think of that his parents would stop him from driving is if they were trying to punish him. And what exactly did he deserve punishment for? Getting beaten up by the Amherst rent-a-cops?

At any rate, a fight obviously broke out and Zion reacted as he had done in the past by packing a few things and getting in his car to leave. However, unlike in the past Zion's parents reported his car stolen. On top of that they also told the police that Zion was planning to "hurt himself or someone else" and obviously this caused the police to totally flip out. Zion was instantly hunted down, his car was intercepted and stopped by multiple police crusiers at an intersection. Zion was forcefully removed from the car and held at gunpoint while they handcuffed him. He was arrested at that point and taken directly to the mental hospital at his parents request.

Zion was obviously not happy about the situation and he felt completely betrayed by his parents who he thought were going to help him get out of this situation, not even deeper into it. As wild and crazy as this situation seemed to be I still felt sympathetic to Zion's plight as this seemed to be just another case of his parents over reacting to normal teenage behavior. I once again asked Zion if there was any way I could help, thinking that perhaps I could speak to the hospital on his behalf to tell them he wasn't crazy or help him try to find some legal help to get him out of whatever trouble he might be in with the police. This time instead of turning down my offer Zion said there was a way that I could help, but he didn't need me to talk to anyone for him, he just wanted me to visit him in the hospital. At first I thought this was a bit of a strange request as it seemed like a strange thing for a guy to ask another guy to do, not to mention the fact that I like to steer clear of mental hospitals. But Zion went on to explain that there was something he needed to talk to me about and he didn't feel comfortable talking about it on the phone. I assumed that he probably had a doctor or something looking over his shoulder and/or listening in on the call, so perhaps he really DID want my help finding a way out of his current situation but didn't want the hospital to know what he was thinking. I could understand that, so I agreed to meet him at the hospital the very next day.

When I arrived at the hospital the next day the staff seemed to think it was a bit odd that someone not realted to Zion would be visiting him, but Zion had apparently told them to expect me and said that he did in fact want to speak with me, so they apparently couldn't send me away. I had to actually go into the mental ward with the "patients" (read: prisoners) through several well guarded security doors. Apparently they were afraid someone was going to try to break out of this place. First I met Zion in a small lobby in the front of the ward with several tables and chairs. This was apparently where guests were meant to speak with the people they were visiting. Zion refused to speak here in front of the hospital staff however and had somehow obtained premission for us to speak in a small "living room" type of room in the back of the ward which had some couches and a small TV. I found it a bit odd that this room was unoccupied at the time but that was probably the least odd of the several odd things which were about to happen.

As soon as we were away from the hospital staff, Zion launched into telling me the "real" story of what had happened at Amherst. He admitted he hadn't been forthcoming with all the details when we had spoken over the phone. This wasn't a suprise to me at all, but what he said next WAS a very big suprise. He began telling a very bizzare and totally insane sounding story about how he believed he was a mage who had been fighting evil his entire life using magic and that this had been going on for a long as he could remember, starting with his "girl friend" in pre-school named Sinia who he also beleived was a mage. I think I vaguely remember him mentioning something about reincarnation and past lives somewhere in this as well. He went on to explain that while he was at Amherst a cult called the "Golden Dawn" was trying to contact him and that he suspected they were either trying to kill him or make him their new leader but he didn't know which one for sure. This was why he was acting so paranoid and had started having insomnia for two weeks right before the incident because it was two weeks before that when he got the first of "the emails" from the Golden Dawn and that was when the "strange things" started happening. (Make note of that again.)

Although it was not known to me at the time, the Golden Dawn is actually a real cult. I saw a documentary about them on the History channel. Like most cults they have a charismatic leader who wants money and sex in large amounts. But unlike most cults they openly worship Satan. They actually call themselves a Satanic church. But according to the documentary they don't stalk prospective members over the internet. There is actually an application you send away for in the mail. This information makes Zion's already incredulous story seem even more doubtful.

I was obviously very suspicious of this whole story right off the bat and although I tried not to be rude about it, I did state in no uncertain terms that I was going to need to see some evidence to back this story up. Zion went on to explain that his current girl friend who was still back in Massachusetts also beleived in magic and would gladly back his story up. I wasn't real sure if I wanted to believe that. Plus, if this girl really did beleive in maigc, I doubted anything she would have to say would be any more convincing than what Zion was telling me now. So I asked for some slightly more tangible evidence. Zion thought about it for a moment but then looked as if he had a sudden revelation and said that he could give me concrete evidence that what he was saying was true. He asked me to write down the login information and password for his email account on the Golden Shields Domain name. He claimed that his first contact with the Golden Dawn was from a series of encoded messages they had emailed to him and if I looked in his email account I could see them for myself. That sounded to me like it would indeed qualify as some pretty good evidence if he could really produce it, so I took the login information and said I would check it when I got home.

At that point I decided it was time to discuss more practial matters, like how Zion was going to get out of this mental hospital. Strangely Zion didn't seem real concerned about that. He said that Ari (!?) had been visiting him as well and he knew they couldn't hold him forever. When he got out he would move out of his parents house and was planning to get an apartment with Ari. I wasn't remotely sure this was a good plan, but considering all the crazy things Zion had said so far, I didn't think trying to argue the point would get me very far at that stage of the game. I promised Zion I would look into his email account to see these emails he talked about and then I excused myself. I tried not to look too excited about leaving but I may not have done a very good job as I was rather rude to one of the staff members who was slightly slow about opening the security doors to let me out of that place.

As soon as I got home I sat down at my computer to check Zion's Email account. I signed in without any trouble and was instantly confronted with an email account packed full of spam mail. Zion had a handful of emails from people he knew, all of which had already been read and then the rest of the several hundred emails he had all looked like spam. I didn't see anything that looked like some sinsiter cult trying to contact him. Oddly he had a few unexplained messages that looked like spam which he had replied to for some reason. I checked his sent messages to see what he had said to these spam messages. In the replies he said things like "I know you are trying to tell me something but I don't know what" and "I don't understand your coded message" so it was clear these spam messages were the emails Zion believed were sent by the Golden Dawn. This was obviously not ture though. Although the spam messages did contain some gibberish text, its highly doubtful it was a code. The Emails were probably sent to his email account as a test to see if the account was active. Spammers sent out such emails to accounts they have never spammed before in the hope that someone will reply and in doing so will confirm that the account is still active and that someone is checking the account, so that if they start sending spam to it they won't just be wasting their time. I believe this is why Zion's email account was spammed with hundreds of messages just shortly after he started sending replis to the "coded" messages.

I did atleast learn one useful thing from Zion's Email account. Several of the emails he had were from his girl friend Hannah who was still living in Massachusetts. Didn't he say she would confirm his story? Maybe it would be a good idea to talk with her after all. I remembered that awhile back Zion had sent me an email where he had used her AIM name to annoy some guy she said was bugging her. Luckily I still had a copy of that Email and I found out what her AIM name was and logged onto AIM and talked to her myself. What she had to say was actually very helpful. First of all, she dispelled the myth that she believed in magic. She explained that Zion had been talking about magic and she did like him a lot, so she kind of tried to play along but she always found the entire thing very weird. She just didn't want to hurt Zion so she couldn't bring herself to tell him that she thought what he was saying sounded crazy. She even continued to play along when he went on his late night walks and began accusing other class mates of being somehow affiliated with the Golden Dawn cultists who were after him. He apparently even dragged her to a "magic circle" in the park one night (in the middle of winter mind you, she said they almost froze to death) and said they had to wait for the Golden Dawn to make contact with them there.

Besides clearing up Zion's suggestion that she would support him on the whole "magic" issue, she also said one other very important thing: She said that at first Zion was totally normal for several months while they were going out but then he suddenly changed exactly two weeks before the incident with the campus police. (Note that time peroid again.) Its interesting to note that she quoted the exact same time frame as Zion did for the start of the unusual events. In Zion's version of course the start of the two weeks began with the first contact with the Golden Dawn via the "coded" emails. However in Hannah's version, Zion seemed to be a totally normal and sane guy who never said anything about magic or cults. But then one day he suddenly couldn't talk about anything else besides magic anymore. I think its very interesting that both Hannah's and Zion's versions of events give the exact same time frame and thus prove that the start of all the problems can be traced to a specific day. Its my opinion that this would perclude the possibility of Zion having one of these trendy "mental disorders" as these are things people usually (claim to) have over long peroids of time, not things they suddenly contract over night. If someone suddenly snapped one day and began talking about magic, wouldn't that sound a lot more like a good old fashioned nervous breakdown?

Unlike in the past when Zion would drop off the face of the earth for weeks at a time, this time he actually called me back from the pay phone only a few days later and wanted to know if I had learned anything. I didn't tell him about my conversation with Hannah as I wasn't sure how he would feel about what she had to say. I did have to explain that that I didn't think his emails meant anything and that by replying to them he wasn't making contact with a sinister cult but was actually just opening his email account to spammers. Amazingly enough Zion didn't flip out or accuse me of being in cahoots with the cultists. He actually seemed to beleive me and admitted that I was probably right and the emails were probably nothing. He also said he wanted my help with one thing further: He was getting out of the mental hospital in a few days and needed someone to pick him up and help him get around town until he could find an apartment and a job. This seemed like a good sign to me as Zion was not talking about magic for once and seemed like he really wanted to get his life back on track. So I agreed to help him of course.

After Zion was released, he luckily managed to find an apartment quickly and asked if I could help him move his things out of his parents house. I was a bit devided on this issue as I wasn't totally sure that his plan to completely cut off contact with his parents was a sound one. But on the other hand he was an adult and shouldn't be living with them either. Plus, they did send him to a mental hospital and I doubt I would have felt any different in his situation. I agreed to help him move. Somehow he rented a truck to move his stuff in and somehow agreed on a time with his parents to move his things out. However the most amazing part was when he announced that Ari's dad would also be helping. Somewhere along the way his realtionship with Hannah had apparently ended (probably when she figured out he was crazy) and now he was getting back with Ari. And her parents were apparently happy about this (probably because it would stop Ari from making fake suicide attempts every week). So happy that her dad was going to help Zion move. So... think about it this way: Ari's dad was so glad that some kid he barely knew was going to be having sex with his daughter again that he was willing to help this kid move out of his parents house whom he couldn't get along with because they sent him to a mental hospital. It was really quite a surreal situation.

Luckily Zion didn't have much stuff, so this move only took one evening. another good reason that he didn't have much stuff was that he didn't have much space in his new apartment either. It was pretty much one small room which servered as both bedroom and kitchen. There was a second "room" which served as a bathroom but was only about the size of a small closet. Actually, I think his closet might have been larger than the bathroom. I also recall being invited to one "party" in this apartment which was attended by Ari and some "interesting" people who Zion had met in the mental hospital. When I arrived it looked a bit like someone had tried to cram an entire hippy commune into Zion's tiny little apartment. There was an obvious lack of chairs so most of the guests were sitting on the floor. Zion made everyone take off their shoes, so everyone was bare foot. And in the center of the aparement was a hooka that everyone was smoking from. I declined to participate and made a point of not asking what it was they were smoking. The "party" was much less fun than the old roof parties had been because nobody got lost or jumped off of anything, it was mostly just a lot of hippies sitting around getting high and talking about how much the mental hospital sucked. It was really kind of depressing.

Not too long after getting out of the mental hospital Zion began talking about how he wanted to continue his "friendship" with Hannah. He also hinted that he had "religious reasons" why he felt it was important for him not to lose contact with her. That was a little creepy. He said he had found out she was back in Colorado (she was from Boulder or Ft. Collins or something) for awhile to visit her parents but that she wasn't anwsering her phone when he called. He wanted to drive up to her house to try to talk with her in person before she went back to Massachusetts. I was fairly convinced at this point that she probably didn't want anything further to do with him and there wasn't much Zion could say or do to change that. But it sounded like Zion was pretty determined to talk with her at any cost, and that meant bad news if he got himself in trouble in the process. I figured that atleast if I went with him I could try to keep him out of trouble and maybe even learn a thing or two about what had happened to him at Amherst, a puzzle I still was looking for a solution to.

On the day we drove up to Hannah's parents house, Zion inisisted on bringing a bag of "perferctly legal mushrooms" along for the ride. I had gone with him the previous day when he went to a Thai restaurant to meet a shady fellow named "Mick" to buy the mushrooms from him. Zion assured me at the time that the mushrooms were "peferctly legal mushrooms, like the ones at King Soopers" (for those that don't live in Colorado, King Soopers is a brand of Super Markets owned by Kroger). I didn't really believe this story, because if they were just ordinary mushrooms, why were we buying them from a shady guy named Mick and not buying them at a super market? Something was obviously fishy about the mushrooms but I didn't really want to argue with Zion about it at the time. I was just glad he wasn't trying to convince me that they were magic mushrooms or something else wacky like that.

When we arrived at Hannah's house all the lights were off and it looked like nobody was home. Zion had thought this was the day she was leaving, so I suggested that maybe she was already gone and we had just missed her. Zion wasn't willing to accept that and was convinced she would be back. So we hung around for awhile and walked around the block before circling back around to her house and knocking on the door again. Clearly she was still not in there. It was about lunch time so I suggested we head back to the highway where there were some fast food places, get some lunch and then head back to Denver. I just didn't think we were going to accomplish anything further here except freaking out Hannah's parents or something if they came home and saw us hanging out in their front yard. It took a lot of convincing but Zion finally agreed and we got out of there. But on the way back to the highway he insisted we check to see if she was in the Waffle House. Apparently he had heard her say something about a Waffle House once and he was convinced she was in there. Even after getting lunch he still wouldn't shut up about Waffle House, so we went in to see if she was there. She wasn't. We finally got on the highway and headed back to Denver.

But as soon as we were on the highway Zion whipped out his cell phone and called her again. As before she didn't anwser and the call went to her anwsering machine. If anyone should have known better than to leave a message on the anwsering maching of someone who doesn't want to talk to you, then Zion should have known better. But apparently he didn't know (or had forgotten that perticular lesson) and started babbling like a crazy person resulting in one of the longest, strangest and most outstandingly creepy messages I've ever heard in my life. I probably should have stopped him at that point, but its a bit hard to drive a car on the highway and stop a crazy person from leaving a crazy message at the same time without making things a lot worse for all parties involved. So I just tried to ignore what he was doing. Perhaps not the best plan in retrospect as you will soon see.

After he was off the phone, I reminded Zion that it may not have been a very good idea to leave that message and I said he should have known better. I had to remind him of what happened that one time we were making the million way call with Brian Powers and he left a death threat on someone's anwsering machine and how much trouble we all got into for that. Somehow that conversation lead into a conversation about the old days when we had so much fun making prank calls and messing with people over the internet. And THAT conversation led into another conversation about Zule who had participated in many of those pranks. Suddenly while talking about Zule, Zion suddenly decided it would be a brilliant plan of action to hunt down Zule and try to sell the bag of mushrooms to him. I was still a bit confused as to why we were still hauling this bag of supposedly legal mushrooms around anyway and I was very sure that looking for Zule was probably a waste of time as he clearly didn't want to be found. Sadly, Zule had gotten involved with some heavy drug use and had done some things that some people weren't entirely happy with him for. I can't really explain further as Zule has told me he doesn't want the details posted on the internet, but the general point of this is that neiter Zion nor myself had heard from Zule in quite awhile and it was no doubt because he didn't want us to know where he was at the time.

On the other hand, I DID wonder what Zule was up to and what had eventually become of him so I eventually agreed that it would be okay for us to go looking for him. And it wasn't like we had anything better to do, so what the hell right? We got off the highway and drove over to Zule's Parent's house. We had heard some rumors that his parents were divorced and that his Dad had started doing heroin or something wacky like that. We also thought he would most likely be living with his brother. But we didn't know where his brother was at, so we figured his parents house was as good a place to start looking as any. We also knew that if Zule was there he would know what my car looked like and would probably not come out if he knew it was us. So I parked up the street and stayed with the car while Zion went down to the house alone to knock on the door, thinking that it might seem less threatening if there was only one of us. Then again seeing a short, crazy looking kid that looks like a Leprechaun sitting on your porch holding a bag of mushrooms is probably threatening enough all by itself which may be why nobody ever came to the door even though Zion was ringing the doorbell and knocking for atleast ten minutes. Zion eventually walked back up the road and said nobody was going to anwser the door.

At this point we decided to call Luke to see if Luke knew where Zule was at, as Luke seemed to be the only person Zule was still on speaking terms with after the past incidents. Amazingly enough, Luke said he was talking to Zule over AIM right that very moment. "Great!" Zion said "Ask if he wants a bag of mushrooms!" I groaned and Luke realyed the question to Zule who was quite shocked that Luke was talking to Zion (he probably suspected the entire thing was another one of Luke's drug induced hallucinations). The conversation went back and forth for awhile as Zion tried to come up with convincing reasons why Zule should buy the bag of mushrooms and Zule had to repeateadly explain that he didn't have any money, didn't have anything to trade and wouldn't want the mushrooms even if he did. It was also discovered that Zule wasn't located in his parents house and that it was highly likely that whoever was in the house at the time probably would have reacted in an unpleasant fashion if we had actually managed to get them to anwser the door. Once it was obvious that Zule wasn't buying the mushrooms, Luke begain asking about them, obviously interested in obtaining them for himself.

"Well Luke, what are you going to GIVE me for the mushrooms?" Zion asked. Luke admitted he didn't have any money. Zion asked if luke had anything to trade for the mushrooms. Luke didn't seem to know if he had anything to trade or not. Zion fianlly had to ask "Luke, look around the room and describe what you see in the room with you!" and suddenly it was like Zion was playing some sort of text based adventure game. Luke would describe what he saw in the room and then Zion would instruct him, one sentence at a time, to pick up items he saw and then place them into a backpack. Before the game was over Zion even had Luke opening containers such as his desk and taking items out of those to place in the backpack as well. By the time it was all said and done the backpack contained a Playstation 2, some PS2 games and a wide array of other miscellaneous items with little value. Luke agreed to trade the backpack and its contents for the mushrooms.

Zion already owned a Playstation 2 so he turned to me and asked if I would be willing to drive him to Luke's place if he gave me the Playstation 2 as payment. I had lost interest in console games by that point, having decided both that the PC was superior and that I didn't want to get addicted to shitty FF7 fan faction again but again, it wasn't like I had anything better to be doing at the time so I was fine with driving Zion to Luke's place. If a Playstation 2 was the reward then all the better I suppose. Of course, you have to understand I agreed to this under the assumption that Luke was located in Castlerock at the time, which was where he usually lived. For those not familliar with what Colorado looks like, Denver is right in the center of the state. There are two main highways cutting through the state, I-25 and I-70. I-25 runs north and south while I-70 runs east and west. The two highways intersect right in the center of Denver, which is right in the middle of the state, which causes these two highways to form a very neat cross covering the entire state. Anywhere you can't get to by driving on I-70 or I-25 probably isn't a place worth going to. Ft. Collins (the city where we had gone to look for Hannah) is about 50 miles north of Denver on I-25. In the opposite direction is Colorado Springs which is about 50 miles south of Denver. Castlerock is a city inbetween Denver and Colorado Springs, only about a 45 minute drive from where we were at the time. Obviously it was not that big of a deal to drive there.

Once the deal had been struck I got on the highway (I-25) and started driving south to Castlerock. Zion was still on the phone with Luke. I had been to Luke's place in Castlerock before but he lived in this strange developement that was hard to find your way around in, so I wanted Zion to get directions from Luke one more time just to be sure we didn't get lost. Zion asked Luke for the directions to find our way to where he was and Luke started telling Zion how to get there. But as they were talking I heard Zion keep asking questions about highways and roads I knew weren't in or even anywhere near Castlerock. I finally interrupted them and asked what the hell they were talking about. It turned out that Luke wasn't in Castlerock at all but was actually in some city that was WAY the hell up in the mountains, further south than Colorado Springs and then quite a bit west into the montains somewhere. This place sounded like it was halfway to Utah or something so I had to ask how long it was going to take us to get there. Zion asked Luke and Luke was fuzzy about an anwser so an arguement broke out between them. They debated back and forth for a few minutes about how fast we could drive, if we could outrun the police and several other rather bizzare things before finally coming to a consensus that it was going to take between seven or eight hours for us to reach Luke's current location. Obviously, I was not okay with this.

Keep in mind we had already been driving all over Colorado for most of the day and it was now late in the afternoon. I would have been okay with going down to Castlerock, hanging out with Luke for a few hours then driving back to Denver. But a seven or eight hour trip up into the mountains just wasn't in the cards. If it took us eight hours to get there and find Luke, another few hours spent making the trade and hanging out and then another eight hours back to Denver, that would have meant I would be getting home at three AM the next day or soemthing. I was actually planning to SLEEP at some point that night, which was something I wouldn't be doing if I was driving Zion all over hell's half acre instead. So ANOTHER arguement broke out. Luke and Zion wanted to make the trade that night but there wasn't any way that I was going to drive all the way to where ever the hell Luke was at that night. We continued to drive south on I-25 while the arguement was still going on. By the time we finally settled the arguement, we were only about five minutes away from our original destination of Castlerock.

The agreement we finally came to was that I was going to leave Zion in Castlerock that night. I would lend him money for a hotel room there and to pay me back for the hotel room he would give me the Playstation 2 when he got it. Meanwhile I would go back to Devner and Zion would stay in Caslterock until he could find a way to get a ride to where Luke was located. I had serious doubts in Zion's ability to do this, but I was getting tired of driving him everywhere and I figured that in the worst case scenario he would just end up having to call me and ask for a ride back to Denver when he found out that there wasn't anyone dumb enough to give him a free ride across half of Colorado just to trade a bag of not-so-legal mushrooms to a pot head in excahnge for a backpack of PS2 junk. Obviously, I was massively underestimating what the worst case scenario was capable of.

The next day I tried calling Zion's cell phone to see if he had given up on making his way to Luke yet. No anwser. I called Luke to see if he had heard from Zion yet. Luke said he hadn't heard anything from Zion since we had talked on the phone the previous day. That was sort of strange but it didn't seem like an excuse to panic yet. The next day I tried again to reach Zion on his cell phone. Still no anwser. I called Luke and Luke had still not heard from Zion either. Days eventually became a full week and by now I had called everyone I thought Zion might have asked to give him a ride to Luke's place but nobody had heard anything from him. As far as anyone else knew, I was the last person who had seen or talked to him. I was obviously a bit worried at this point that Zion might have done something really stupid like trying to hitchhike to Luke's place and that he might have gotten into some kind of trouble along the way. I was also worried that his frozen corpse was going to turn up in some mountain valley somewhere and that his parents were going to blame me for his legs getting gnawed off by wolves or something. On the other hand, I couldn't really call the police and say "Hey, my friend who just got released from the mental hospital (after you arrested him) has gone missing. I last saw him after I ditched him in Castlerock because he was trying to trade some illegal mushrooms to a pot head in the mountains. Would you mind looking for him?" Yeah, that kind of request probably wouldn't have gone over very well.

So I waited.

And WAITED.

True to form, it took a few weeks and one day I got a call from a pay phone. Zion was back in the mental hospital. And as usual, it was a HUGE misunderstanding.

This time his story was that after I had dropped him off at the hotel he had decided it would be a good idea to "sample" the mushrooms. He admitted, finally, that the mushrooms were not of the ordinary King Soopers variety as he previously tried to convince me but were actually some kind of hallucinogenic drug. Obviously after taking some of them he started to hallucinate. Apparently he was under the impression at this point that "goverment agents" were watching him and, even more bizzare, he thought that they were breaking into his hotel room to steal things from him. Zion started to freak out over this. Now, when someone takes drugs, starts to hallucinate, believes that something bad is happening to them and freaks the hell out, this is known as a BAD TRIP. People on bad trips do stupid things and get themselves in trouble. So of course Zion did something stupid and got himself in trouble. He was apparently so freaked out by the cleptomaniac goverment agents that he decided to call his parents and ask them for a ride home. His parents showed up at the hotel and despite the fact that they regularly accused Zion of using drugs they apparently still couldn't tell when he was having a bad trip. So they tossed him in the car, told him they were taking him home and instead drove him directly to the mental hospital... AGAIN.

But somehow there was even worse news than that. Apparently in the weeks that had passed since I had last talked to Zion, he had dsicovered that Hannah had gotten a restraining order aginst him! I told him that message was creepy! At this point I wanted to discuss the more practical matters of how Zion was going to handle the restraining order and how he was going to get out of the mental hospital this time. But as before he didn't want to talk about anything practical. He wanted to talk about Hannah. He was still convinced that he needed to be friends with her for some complex series of reasons related to magic or religion or something along those lines. He wasn't making any sense and I finally ran out of tolerance for this non-sense and told him so. He wanted me to call Hannah and talk to him for her but I directly told him that was a bad idea and I wouldn't do it. Zion kept trying to convince me by giving all sorts of "magical" reasons why he felt it was important for him to continue his realationship with her (he liked to babble about "love" a lot even though I highly doubt he really understood what love was). I couldn't stand to listen to it any longer. I finally told him outright that his magic mumbo jumbo was a bunch of BS and I didn't want to hear any more about it. He seemed very depressed about that fact but amazingly enough he did comply and I never heard him say another thing about magic after that. Atleast not to me anyway.

Eventually Zion did get released from the mental hospital. After that he did NOT ask me for any more rides anywhere.

He did however start to mention how he had talked to a "cousin" of his who was supposedly living in Chicago and was a "priestess" in the Golden Dawn. He claimed that she had offered to let him move to Chicago and live with her so that she could teach him about the Golden Dawn. Zion hinted that he was actually considering doing this but didn't expalin how he was going to get there or what he was going to do for money if he did this. I somehwat hinted that I considered this to be a very stupid plan of action and he stopped talking about it for awhile.

Meanwhile though, he finally got off his ass and followed through on his long standing threat to turn the Golden Shields into a "Comdey website" rip-off of Something Awful.

Go to Chapter XI, The "Comedy" Website