Douglas, I knew it. I knew something was up. You had that look in your eye when I left. That whole smug “Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .” thing that you always do. I saw the same look in your eye that night in St. Louis after Cult a Con when I told you to hang on before ordering that pizza. I told you I was going to be, like, 20 minutes and to please wait so that there would be some Za left for me, and what did I see on the table when I showed up 40 minutes later? Just crusts. Well, you’ve done it again. What did I show up to find at the compound today? Crusts. Human crusts. I was gone for three days, and you all killed yourselves without me. 

29 bodies? That will look a little suspicious to a God you claimed to be fairly “unforgiving” when it came to the details. 

“Don’t use Douglas’s controller when he goes to the bathroom. Bizdarr hates it when you do that.” 

“Don’t eat Douglas’s pizza pops, or you’ll feel Bizdarr’s wrath.” 

Bizdarr, Bizdarr, Bizdarr. 

Forged in heat and pressure in a cruel, ever-hurtling comet, blah, blah, blah . . . we all have to kill ourselves to board the comet, blah, blah, blah . . . we are going to do it on the 29^th, blah, blah, blah. Or was it the 26th? I’m not great with my calendar, to be honest.

But why jump the gun? Why take the burning hot comet ride to the next dimension without me? 

I certainly wasn’t the worst member of the cult. Sure, I can be a little dramatic sometimes, like after the aforementioned pizza incident when I defiled your Bizdarr painting by scrawling “Pizza Judas” on it, but I’m not Robin, that’s for sure. Even for a member of a cult, that dude is an absolute freak. Always microwaving his fish leftovers, always telling people in a clear and decisive way not to eat his fish leftovers. And the way he’d get SO mad when I’d eat his fish leftovers. I always wondered what his deal was, but now I’ll never know because HE’S DEAD AND RIDING ON AN ETERNAL ROCKET IN THE AFTERLIFE, AND I’M STUCK IN GODDAMN OHIO. 

And what about Rudi? We can say it now—the guy was a racist. I knew he was from a different generation, and the standards might have been different, but every time we ordered Chinese food, it was an unmitigated disaster. Come to think of it, I hope Bizdarr isn’t into cancelling folks because he’ll be miiiiiighty busy the next time y’all Uber-eats some Indian food to that shithole comet you’re all stuck on.

Really, all I wanted out of this whole Cult thing was some answers, some real honest to Bizdarr answers about why my life has always felt incomplete. Looking back, I was an easy target for a cult. And yes, I’ll call it that. “Community,” “Commune,” “Brother and Sisterhood,” I heard my fellow culties throw these innocent-sounding names around, but I never bought into that. We are a cult, goddamnit. I didn’t sign away all my home equity and meagre possessions to Douglas so I could join a community. I gave away my financial future to buy some relationships that would last forever. I’m not saying that I expected to also have sexual relationships, but when you cash out all of your stocks, bonds and 401k’s, you kind of expect some sexual relationships. I didn’t expect us to all be singing Kumbaya around the comet every night, but to be absolutely ditched the way I was while on a sneaker run, no less? Humiliating. If only I had Bizdarr’s fourth and sixth eyes, I could’ve seen how Douglas would betray me, and I’d tell him right there, in that timeshare meeting, that he could shove his cult, or should I say his CLICK, up his ass. I can’t believe I bought that timeshare.

But now I find myself more incomplete than ever. What’s next for me, the survivor? Celebrity? We are, at best, three years away from any kind of podcast series that will hold anyone’s interest, and a good five years AFTER that for the 10-part Netflix documentary that I’m already noodling on. A new life? I don’t want to presume too much about my former cult compatriots, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the shared cult bank account is probably closer to empty than it is to full, so it looks I’m more or less stuck in Ohio for a while. Start a cult, you say? Well, you wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that the guy who does the sneaker runs is kept well on the periphery of the inner workings of a successful cult. It would truly be the blind leading the blind.

I hope you are happy, Douglas. Flying through space on your molten hot comet of lies for all of eternity, surrounded by all the friends I paid good money to have access to. I hope Bizdarr takes one long look at you and says, “29 members? That’s a bit suspicious.” If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be on my own molten hot comet: A timeshare in Tempe, Arizona. Fuck you, Douglas. Fuck you two times.