Daily Affirmations

In the spring of 1975, a stucco storefront opened in Clearwater, Florida. Locals had noticed a new kind of arcade-style commercial property realtors had taken to calling a “strip” shopping mall, with units sunk into the same concrete mold in the style of a gallery. A tax services company sat on one side and a bail-bondsman on the other. Between them a sign was hung bearing the words UNITED CHURCHES OF FLORIDA.

There was no legitimate company by that name, and no such confederation. The name had been chosen by the storefront’s owner especially for its blandness, as he had private affairs to conduct. Who, he told his companions, would bother knocking on that door?

On paper, the founder of United Churches of Florida was a pulp science-fiction writer and former Army brat from Tilden, Nebraska named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard. For the past twelve years he had been circumnavigating the globe on a sixty-foot pleasure vessel he’d christened the Apollo, fleeing multiple charges of tax evasion. He’d been expelled from over twenty seaports along with a sizable cabal, loyal adherents of a program of behavioral philosophy Hubbard created some years ago, during a period of intense novel-writing—he’d previously specialized in three-page stories set on distant planets—and which Hubbard had christened Scientology.

Unbeknownst to his various disciples, who considered Hubbard an authentic, possibly alien genius, the CIA had begun tracking the Apollo after hearing a bizarre tip on ship-to-ship radio traffic that Hubbard was serving as a clandestine agent. More than this, said the anonymous report, he had been part of the agency’s most important employ, a high-level black-operations officer with top clearance, having started his service during the dark, early years of the agency, in the tumult following World War II.

Hubbard had indeed served in the U.S. Navy, that much was clear, for naval records reflected his service, but that was all. The agency had uncovered evidence of someone having attempted to falsify his service records by pumping them up to reflect a more battle-scarred experience. This lone detail raised a flag, for it was a typical black-operations cover. Another flag: no one at the agency from those years had been able to either confirm or disprove Hubbard’s service. Not a single agent recalled ever working with, speaking to, or meeting him face to face. And Hubbard was, to put it mildly, memorable: a wheezing, wispily-red-haired, alopecia-stricken, halitosis-and-dandruff-suffering, balding toad of a pale white male with a trick back and a twitchy, giggling manner, along with a mouth of rotten teeth and a dismaying sex addiction made all doubly desperate by his conviction that women found him repellent. Such a persona caused agency personnel to speculate Hubbard’s identity had to be an elaborate cover, he had to have worked black-ops, by God, he just had to be one of the anonymous legends. He was put under surveillance by active maritime agents. After eight weeks of research and infiltration, they unveiled a much simpler story, and the CIA dropped pursuit. The inter-agency report, shared with European Interpol as well as the FBI, concluded:

[Hubbard] is a shrewd businessman who has parlayed ‘religion’ into a multi-million-dollar business by taking advantage of that portion of society prone to fall for such gimmicks

Enfeebled in body by his late sixties, Hubbard was also powerfully homesick; he longed to spend his autumn years living in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains. Lawyers found an opening: if “Scientology” could establish a branch not in Colorado but in Florida, a state known for its lax laws concerning the legitimacy of any such enterprises, its leader would be permitted entry as a type of diplomat, a credentialed representative of that religion’s overseas mission, no matter how many taxes he had personally evaded. Scientology moved in and established a beachhead in the Clearwater strip mall.

It was all for naught; Hubbard was dying.

With new converts coming onto the Apollo every week to wish the prophet well, Hubbard could no longer hide in his quarters, claiming that he could only receive visions when completely left alone, recording the holy scripture of those alien forefathers who had chosen him as their vessel. His physical decline was obvious, and yet a majority of his followers were convinced the man was immortal. Confused, they argued among themselves, claiming his poor health was not merely evidence of a martyr-like devotion to the faith but could also embody Docetism (the belief that the messiah appeared in a sickly form on earth, while a true immortal form thrived in outer space). A few disillusioned followers decided that Hubbard’s physical deterioration flatly contradicted his many bizarre health claims, which he had been trying to sell for more years than he’d been writing science fiction—for example, that bouts of intense monastic concentration could defeat shingles. On his deathbed, everyone noticed, Hubbard was covered in shingles.

L. Ron Hubbard died of organ failure in the winter of 1986, aged seventy-four. Personal effects in his private safe amounted to over three thousand legal pads obsessively scribbled over, a life’s work dating back to his time as a college student and up through the years riding a desk and pushing pencils for the U.S. Navy, onto his early drafts as a deadline writer, his failed salesman gigs, his failed marriages. Strangely, to those who found the journals, no alien visits were recorded. There was no religious talk, no outer space visions, no fantasy. The jottings were normal if not eye-crossingly dull. Pages overflowed with fragments of daily observations, descriptions of weather and lunches, benefactor names he told himself to remember, mathematical computations of monthly budgets, some grocery lists, novel and story ideas, but mostly, thousands of one-line self-affirmations. On every single page, at least two or three personal asides and exhortations had been jotted down: they were Hubbard’s notes to persist, to endure, and to believe. Scientology’s creator composed his own destiny this way, envisioning if not willing success, secure in the privacy of his own modest hopes.

You are not repellent to women.
Your back is fine.
You do not need to invent fictions to impress people.