The rooms were always too dark, too stuffy. Obviously hosting support groups isn’t high on a church’s priority list but damn, why did they have to turn off the air and keep half the overhead lights out? Dave was pulled from his random facilities management thoughts as the discussion made itself around the circle to him.

“Hi, I’m Dave,” he said quickly, more out of habit than a desire to introduce himself.

“Hi Dave,” the group chanted back in an ironically cultish manner.

“It’s been six months since the last time. I don’t know, I’ve mostly been staying in the house, avoiding people. I feel like everything is out of control.”

“Now Dave, we know that’s a lie we tell ourselves,” Simon, the group leader, said patiently. “We have ultimate control over our actions and decisions.”

Simon attempted to speak from a place of authority but Dave, and most of the group, could see through him. He was just some volunteer who was free the same night as the room in the church.

The man never led a cult in his life.

“Yea, well, that’s a nice thing to say but it isn’t exactly true now, is it,” Dave snapped.

“Dave’s right, you get these weak minded people around you and suddenly they look to you for everything,” Deanna said. Deanna was an old head in cultoholic circles. Over the last thirty years she had lead to sex cults, a suicide cult and started a religion that went bankrupt trying to build a temple/farm/creamery in northern Wisconsin.

“Okay Deanna, let’s respect the circle,” Simon admonished. “I know it seems easy to blame others for our mistakes, but we have to take responsibility.”

“Look, I hear you Simon, honestly, I do,” Dave said as he calmed down. “But honestly, what about these followers, when do they take responsibility?”

“Yeah, you never have an answer for that, do you Simon?” Kenny, crypto, suicide and sex cults, asked. Kenny was always quick to blame the followers.”

“You have a point, but let’s be honest,” Simon said as he shifted in his chair. “I’m not here with a group of cult followers. I’m here with a roomful of cult leaders, and that’s where I’m going to focus my energies.”

“So like my last sex cult,” Kenny continued, ignoring Simon. “I’m just at a bar and I’m drunk off my ass and I start joking about dropping out of society and fucking for the rest of my life.”

“Oh, I know where this is going,” Maggie, mlm, sex cult. “Where it always goes.”

“Exactly, I wake up the next morning with three people in my bed and about 30 people throughout my apartment all in various stages of sleep, sex or breakfast.”

“Well you have to…”

“Have to what, Simon? He made a joke about fucking and a bunch of weak minded simpletons followed him home,” Dave said angrily. “You keep saying to take responsibility, but what should we do? Never talk to anyone?”

“Well, you could recognize your own… personal charms. Maybe tamp it down a bit in public,” Simon stammered out a response.

“Bullshit!” Rex yelled. He had been sitting quietly, as usual, but this set him off. “I tried that. I tried being rude to people, put up boundaries. Suddenly I’m leading a cult of outcasts. They wanted to get this, they wanted to buy a warehouse and then fill it with cubicles so we could all be alone together in our private spaces.”

“Well sure but…” Simon said trying to get a handle on the meeting.

“Well sure, nothing.” Dave said. “Look, why don’t you admit that you’re just here because this church, just another kind of cult by the way, is paying you to sit here with us.”

“That’s false, I do care.”

“You’re just trying to do Alcoholic Anonymous but with us for being, what, popular?” Deanna yelled. “There are no 12 steps for this, just admit that.”

“Well I…”

“You know what? Fuck this shit,” Rex said as he stood from his chair. “How about this, I go start my own group, and we’ll have meetings and we’ll do things our way.”

“Oh, I would be super interested in that,” Maggie said as she stood next to Rex.

“No, this is exactly what we shouldn’t do,” Simon pleaded.

“I’ve got some land upstate, we could use it as a camp,” Deanna added. “We can live up there, in a utopia, and then work on ourselves.”

“Exactly,” Dave said, as he stood and started walking out the door with the others. “We don’t need society to tell us how to live. We have our own way to go.”

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