GREETINGS MY HOLY WOODIAN BROTHERS AND SISTERS and to all of you who have yet to become Woodites, we who follow our savior Ed, then this most important lesson will be a cornerstone by which you may one day build a temple in your heart for Ed Woood!

This, once again, is Reverend Steve Galindo, the founder and Pope of The Church of the Heavenly Wood, the world's first Ed Wood-based religiion. I am sorry if my penchant for the dramatics has in any way upset or scared any of you who are reading this, lesson 23 in the neverending lessons of Wood, but I feel that the warnings that preceeded this are, in fact, highly justified.

This is the long awaited update of Lesson 5, a much needed update that, for many reasons which I will delve in great detail over these next few pages, I have been strongly avoiding for a substantial amount of time until now. It wasn't until recent events, and by that I am referring to the horrendous terrorist attacks inflicted upon the United States this past week, that a wave of American, media-driven single-mindedness has created a false idol made out of gold and placed it high above a pedestal, and by that I am referring to the swarm of idiots who have now begun to worship Nostradamus.

This Nostradamus hype has forced me to update lesson 5 and with it drop a bombshell that will forever change the Ed Wood landscape.

So, let me first start with talking more about the lesson in questioned.

I created Woodism, the Ed Wood-centered and pop-culture-themed legal religion, way back in 1996. In 1997, I had over 1,000 followers and many of them wanted to learn more about the religion and its beliefs, essentially wanting structure. So I began what i called the "lessons of wood," a series of parables and sermons that would bring Woodism to the Woodites out there, hopefully helping form Woodism better, more clearer and crisp and structured without becoming too structured.

It is obvious that the lessons, so far up to 23, go through phases of differentiating styles and forms. These have been written over a period of almost five years, and looking at them, reading all of them individually, it can easily be seen the differences in the writing styles and subjects.

The teenage lessons, especially lessons 14, 15, and 16, were extremely lighthearted. The most recent ones have been focusing more on myself, more on current events, more on my personal life, and the first few were incredibly serious attempts at making Woodism a very real religion. In these first lessons, while I was attending religion classes at Arizona State University as well as taking a few Bible study courses here and there to learn more and to better myself in that which I disagree with, I used what I learned to help form Woodism, adapting and putting a fresh spin on old, outdated terms such as ontos and eschatology.

And this brings us to the fabled lesson 5.

This is the early lesson where I tried to create the eschatology for Woodism. Now, eschatology, using the definition used within lesson 5, is "a religious theme regarding the ultimate, universal end of existance that is prevalent in all major religions." Now, it took me many, many months to finally lay down what the eschatology was for Woodism and this, I eventually was sure, lie in the predictions of Criswell.

The first two paragraphs of the lesson are historical biographical information on Criswell's strange life and his eventual metamorphosis from mortitian's son to America's best loved psychic of the late forties and early fifties.

What follows after this short biography is my attempt to make Criswell a strong being within the church (it is stated in the lesson that Criswell "sits at the right hand" of Ed) and, more than that, to try and stress the fact that, although while he acted in Ed's films he openly stated on numerous occasions that he thought that he himself was full of shit, that in fact many of Criswell's predictions were partially true, albeit not entirely.

For an example of this, I suggest you purchase the book The 70 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen - in it, they discuss some of Criswell's greatest predictions of the future and discuss, albeit barely, the fact, recently mentioned in an issue of "Maxim" magazine, that Criswell is known to have partially correctly predicted the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was then, after I tried to establish the partially correct concept of Criswell's predictions, I stated that, according to Criswell ...

And that became our eschatology.

Now, what follows next is the final statement, slightly edited for space, that originally appeared in lesson 5. The qute that follows is honestly and truly eery and freaky given the current state of affairs which, I promise, will become clearer to you all as time passes ...

Now, I think that this is the perfect time for you to let that sink into your brain while we switch gears. I apologize ahead of time for the sad, somber tine that we are about to take.

This past week, namely on September 11th, 2001, the world was stunned as terrorist attacks by at this point an unknown person or persons killed an unknown amount of innocent people. The number is expected to be in the high thousands. This is a horrible time for everyone, including myself. As of the date that this was written, I still have relatives missing. I haven't been getting sleep. I haven't been eating. I've been, I fear quite literally, drinking myself to death like Ed Wood did in his later years. I've been lost and confused and wanting this all to end.

I'm scared to death.

I'm not ashamed in any American manliness sort of way to admit this to you. I am scared. As of writing this, I still have a few handfulls of relatives and loved ones who I can only hope are still alive. So for the past few days, I have been despondent and moody and, as our savior Ed did when he wanted to chase away the negative beings in his ontos, drinking like a Wood. And occasionally crying. That has been my past few days in the shadow of this crisis that, years from now, will be as remembered as Pearl Harbor and Ed Wood's birthday.

But I am scared for one good reason - I forsee a long period of fire and bloodshead comiing from the events of September 11th. I forsee a period of danger, of war, of death that will stretch beyond our borders and into possibly every corner of this entire globe. I am afraid because of the possibilities of the future and NOT because of Nostradamus.

And that, dear Woodites, brings us full circle to what has been going on in light of this crisis, something that quite frankly has been pissing the living shit out of me, as it should you, and I am not one who angers easily.

I need to talk about this now and, using my knowledge of Ed Wood, Criswell, and all things Woodian, expose this Nostradamus stuff as what it is ... pure crap. Let's talk about Nostradamus for a while, shall we?

Now, for historical sake, let's say I hope that this lesson is and will be read years beyond my death as a historical record of Woodism, let me explain where my beef with Nostradamus is coming from. About 24 hrs. after the bombing of the World Trade Center, like a rash or a hideous disease, an e-mail made its way into I would say about 50% of Americans with e-mail addresses. Millions of people can vouch for me on that statement.

Although it differed greatly, the one I received was headlined with the shocking words ... "NOSTRADAMUS WAS RIGHT!" And here is one version of the e-mail. This is the one that I received on September 12th, 2001 ...

And in all likelihood, that doesn't sound like the one that you might have heard or have read or have read about in newspapers or in books. Do you know why? Well, after about a week of study, this one I received isn't the one that most other pople received from idiot friends and loved ones in their in boxes.

In fact, this second one might sound a bit more familiar ...

I will be the first one here to admit that for a while, at least a day, I feel victim to the mass hysteria caused by this bogus Nostradamus prediction. yeah, for a little tiny bit, I thought that this was true, that Nostradamus predicted this whole thing and that the world was actually going to end. Then I woke up.

You see, there is a really good chance that my short belief in the phony prediction of Nostradamus' would and could have been a lot longer period, possibly one without end if I didn't work where I do. Let me talk about this for a bit ...

I work at a major bookstore chain in Phoenix, Arizona. A small but vocal minority of Woodites complain about this, the fact that I am Reverend Steve, Saint Steve, the almighty Steve, and His Holiness Pope Steve, and yet I am a bad example for everyone because I work for shit pay in shit jobs. It took me a while to see it from their point of view but I think I finally understand this.

Now, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, I am a charismatic religious leader that has a lot of followers. At times I am raised up to this pinnacle, especially recently what with my interviews on Mancow and Noward Stern and ABCnews.com and e-yadda.com and so on, that a lot of people see Reverend Steve and expect my life to be a massive party, a swanky lifestyle, I guess a lot like Jesus except with a bigger, cheaper happy hour and better pot.

But the way that I look at it, my working in semi-shitty jobs AND being a religious leader is religiously justified because of Andy Kaufman. he is one of the greatest actors and this is why - he starred in the television show "Taxi" and made millions of dollars and instantly became a worldwide celebrity, an instant household name, and yet during this time he continued to work 40 hours a week being paid minimum wage as a busboy at a local New York deli.

Can you believe that? Hell, even Jesus gave up the whole carpentry thing when he started doing stand-up comedy, but I digress. Why would the star of a major network television show stil work a shitty minimum wage job? So that he could constantly remember that he is a normal human being. And that's why I work.

And for less than 24 hours, the whole Nostradamus thing really freaked me out, made me think. And then, all that was dashed to hell when I came to work the next day, the big bookstore chain, remember? Well, I had friends and relatives missing and I was pretty much crying and having asthma attacks all day, but I mustered up the coourage and the testicular fortitude to go to work, and I learned something very important ...

People, humans, are instinctively sheep. In America, doubly so. The only time people will ever buy a book is when another medium tells them so, like, say, NPR or the newspaper or Time magazine or the movies or Entertainment Weekly or public television or the news or TheOprah (like The Borg). People think they are original and unique when most of the time they're just cows slowly being led into the hamburger machine.

So what I'm saying is, every dumb slack-jawed yokel with a "Dale Earnhardt Remembered" t-shirt on and a car with Calvin peeing on something came in to the bookstore right behind every mindless, soulless corporate yuppie to look for Nostradamus books. About every three minutes, I got some dumb ass, clueless sheep asking me where our Nostradamus section was. I even had one guy, showing you all how much of a flock of sheep we are, one guy in his mid-twenties actually said to me "Yeah, I'm, uh, looking for a book by an author. His name's Nostradamus. I don't know his first name?"

And I have this thing, this intriquing Woodian trait that I believe I share with a fair percentage of the other Woodites out there, where I wiill automatically rebel against the popular standard norm of society. Whatever everyone else likes, I become angry with and frightful of. I mean, in all honesty I would probably like American Pie and Swingers and that one Crouching Tigger movie that was thrown down the throats of everyone who hadn't seen it and liked it, but they have been embraced by everyone, even all the clueless, mindless, faceless assholes who hate me as well as all those backassward loser on the planet, so I automatically rebelled against all said films. It's just something I do.

So, come Heaven or high water, I made it my mission to expose this Nostradamus quote for the fraud it really was, thereby freeing so many sheep from their eventful death, saving the minds of millions of Americans. It took all of about seven minutes.

While conducting my initial search for web pages on the internet that might help me with my quest, I stumbles upon a highly reputable web site that makes it its mission to debunk or verify popular urban legends. And this is what it had to say about this whole Nostradamus thing ...

Do you think, however, that this will make any difference whatsoever? No, and so far, it hasn't. Americans are sheep to such a full extent that the truth posed here will make absolutely no difference whatsoever. This is the truth and nobody cares except for us few who seek the truth.

Very few people, a small minority of human beings, care at all about the truth. Why should you care about the painful truth when, like most of the rest of the world, you can hide under the covers and pretend that everything is okay? America's sudden blind fascination with Nostradamus is in many ways the same as Americans and their occasional patriotism. The mass market media machines like to say during times of crisis, like the one we are currently in, that during times of crisis is when America really rallies together and we see our nation's true patriotism.

I love America but I think that's crap.

I believe, against a nation of opposition, that the amount of Americans who are actually, truly patriotic can be measured by things that, obviously, most Americans don't care about. How many Americans vote? Think about that one for a while, the small amount of the American population that cares enough to stop watching Carson Daily and Jay Leno for enough time as it takes to vote. How many Americans vote for the f-en PRESIDENT let alone in local city elections?

Honestly, about how many people do you think really care, really give a rat's ass in America, about their city and their neighborhoood (hell, evenjust their neighbors) and their local and national elected officials? How many people do you think care at all on a daily basis of the hard work and determination that people give to make our lives safe, people likke the policemen and the firefighters that are at the time of writing this searchiing the rubble of the World Trade Center searching for survivors?

Nobody cares about any of these things until there's an enemy to place the blame, a scapegoat (for Americans, preferably a racially-motivated enemy) to syphem all the blame for ruining all of our lives. Only in times of crisis do Americans show patriotism. We couldn't GIVE AWAY any of our old, dirty Nostradamus books, gathering dust in our "new age" section and now people are on a forty name long waiting list for this bull. It's the same thing with patriotism. We are a nation of sloiled kids who always cries in the theater during the best part of the movie.

We're only patriotic in moments of crisis and war. Otherwise, most Americans hate America. And in this sense, I realized immediately that no matter how much I scream, how much I yell, how much a beg and plead and preach, no one would give a rat's ass that the Nostradamus prediction was fake.

I'd have to fight fire with fire. And this brings us full circle.

Yup, I saved the world, bitches!

Well, not JUST me per se but me and Ed and Criswell and all of the Woodites worldwide who take what we do seriously and promote love and peace and religious tolerance to everyone everywhere, those brave souls who live their lives based on our savior Ed. And no, I am not joking and no, I am not making all this up. Woodism saved the world.

Let's talk about this and, more importantly, why I never mentioned it until now. You see, up until now, I was afraid to mention it. I was honestly afraid of the truth, afraid to accept responsibility for what HAD happpened and what MIGHT have happened. I didn't want to even begin to think that I might have saved the world.

And did I really? Well, that's up for you to decide. Let's go back to the date in questioned and see what happened from MY own point of view ...

I was on Mill Avenue on August 18th, 1999. I was newly 22 years of age and I was, at the present moment, drunker than all hell. here's a listing of what I did. First off, I woke up early at around five in the morning and instantly started doing shots of Jack Daniels. Now, I hate shots, yes, it's true. But I figured if, and that was a big !IF! at the time, if this was to be the day that the world was going to end, then I better go ahead and do whatever the hell I wanted.

Honestly, I was scared shitless all that day. I had studied up on Criswell's predictions past the point where, two years prior, I has created the eschatology which stated that that day, August 18th, would be the last day of existance. THAT and various other reasons at the time (the coming of a new century, the end of the mellennia, dogmatic religious freaks thinking Jesus was returning soon, and the Y2K scare) make these few months leading up to 2000 to be a time of panic, fear, and confusion. So it made perfect sense to me that the world would end that day annd that it wouldn't be until the new milennia that, as he so rightfully predicted, the smoke would clear.

I honestly thought that the world was going to end that day. So, fuck it, I decided that if this was going to be the end of the fucking world that I was going to party right.

I took a public bus to Tempe, the ritzy section of Phoenix, and bought some pot from a friend of mine that I knew. Now, at tthis point in time let me stress what I tried to stress briefly in the previous lesson, Lesson 22, that I rarely ever do the weed. usually, I hate it and try to steer clear, but what with the world ending and all, I hit it first thing in the morning. Then, while I waited for the bars to open, I walked to a adult bookstore that has arcades, those small "nudie booths" where for a dollar you get so many minutes of whatever kind of porn you want. And what's so special about this specific place is that it (was) open 24 hours and it has locking doors on its booths. I'll spare you the details of my time there, but as I have already said many times before, like Ed, I am a pervert, and by the time I walked back to Mill Avenue, I was at Hooters getting plastered.

Walking out of the Hooters, I looked up at the sky. Something wasn't right. I could feel it, somehow, in the sky and in my bones and in my blood. Something was wrong.

I spend the whole rest of the day walking around aimlessly, smoking, drinking on a small one man pub crawl, and occasionally runniing into Woodites who I in turned smoked and drank with. I was killing myself, smoking and drinking at a level that not only had I never done before but that I didn't think I was fully physically capable of ever doing EVER in my entire life. But the way I saw it, I wasn't going to live to see tomorrow. Neither would anyone else. And IF the fates shined upon me so that I actually did see the sun rise, then I'd be so happy that I could live with whatever pain I'd have when I woke up.

But I did what I did that day because, and it's hard to say, but apart from my fears at the time fuelled by the media that put me in this panic-type haze, I had this pain in my stomache and in the back of my head and it told me that something was happening that I didn't know about. something was happening. Something out there. I swear to Wood that that was my feeling and nobody believed the veracity of my statement because, as I said before, I had been drinking and smoking and jerking since five in the morning.

But the pain in the back of my head told me that something was happening somewhere, something big, something that would change things forever.

The next morning, as I woke up with a hangover the size of the sun, all I could do was laught in spite of myself and my Criswell-inspired foolishness. How much of a fool could I have been to do all that I did the previous day just because I though that the world was going to end?

The pain in the back of my head was gone and I soon forgot about it. I was still alive and so was the rest of the world.

And so it was, as Criswell predicted, that it wasn't until 2000 that the smoke cleared.

When the smoke finally cleared and I found out the source of the pain in the back of my head that fatteful day, I tried to dismiss it juust like most of you reading this will dismiss it when I finally do tell you (instead of dragging you around like a madman for a cheap dramatic thrill) but to those nay-sayers amongst us, I say that it is indeed ok to not believe what I am about to say - hell, I didn't believe it for over a year now. That's been a year now since, as Criswell said, the smoke finally cleared and, thanks to our greatest, most vehement follower, Reverend Saint Tor (Tor being his baptismal name) todl me about the true sordid events of that fateful day.

I didn't believe it and still I have a hard time believing it, but let me ask you a few questions. See if you can guess the answers to all of these questions ...

What controversial space satellite is sponsored secretly by United States government dollars? What NASA-sanctioned space craft was and is currently being used to carry hundreds of points of dangerous poisonous chemicals as a government experiment? And, finally, what space craft flew in orbit over the earth on August 17th, ran into some problems on the 18th, and almost crashed onto American soil. causing the deaths of a few million innocent civilians?

Do you get it yet? Has the smoke finally cleaared in your mind? Do you fully comprehend the severity of this statement here, this lesson, and what it means to the world? It means, once and for all, that Criswell was right. And so it Woodism. We, the people of Woodism, are right and as such very, very righteous.

The date, which is one that should be remembered forever as the day that Criswell and the hearts of loyal Woodites everywhere averted a catastrophy, was August 18th 1999. It was the end of the world for some folks that day...it was the begining of the world for others...could it be that what DID NOT happen...or in other words...that which was prevented is that which we as Woodites should now rejoice over. What could kill the population of Earth that happened to be around on that fateful day that will forever live in history? What could have come from OUTER SPACE and affected us upon that fateful day that Criswell so rightfully predicted oh so many years ago and that I, reverend Steve, forsaw back in 1997?

Oh ye of little faith, I ask you, what could have caused us to become either dead or those who would have been in so much pain that we wished for our own quick, miserable deaths? What would have looked like a "black rainbow" as it burned upon entering the Earth's air from outer space carrying over 70lbs. of material, each pound containing billions of molecules and each and every single molecule able to kill a person in seconds?

I'll tell you what. The Cassini space vehicle. This isn't a lie and this isn't bullshit. I am not making this up. Criswell's prediction about the world coming to an end was RIGHT! And it was the 5th Lesson of Wood that saved us all.

The Cassini space vehicle is a government-regulated machine that regularly makes fly-bys over our world's atmosphere containing sometimes hundreds of nuclear chemicals. It is something hiddden from the media, froom the national and international press, something that the world is hush-hush about, something not to be talked about for such cop-out reasons as "national security."

And when did the government supposedly lose track of this deadly nuclear missile in space for hours, not knowing if it was still in orbit or had crashed, killing millions? This happened on the date that Criswell said that "the world will end" and on the date that I said that "a chain of events will unfold on this date that will eventually lead to a conflict in which many people will eventually die." And that is a quote from me from August of 1997.This was all forseen by Criswell and Woodism.

The almost end of existance, the end of the world, does not lie in the hannds of Nostradamus. No. Hell no! Hell, it's not even HIS prediction! No, what happened on August 18th, 1999 was forseen correctly by Criswell, by Ed Wood, and by myself, Reverend Steve Galindo.

Have you heard about this? Of course you didn't. Notice that this isn't talked about, this dear-death catastrophic state of events in the history of our existance. This is a cover-up of the highest order. This is the JFK assasination for a new century. We may never know how close we came to all dying a horrid, horrible death thanks to NASA and the American government.

Meanwhile, Nostradamus is on every news station in the country right now. Funny how easiily the sheep can be led to the slaughter, huh?

So there, in all its unfettered glory, is the truth about what happened on that fatefull day. What follows is this lesson are some links to organizations that are fighting on a daily basis against the technoterrors in our planet's skies. So here, below these last paragraphs, we have brought you all the evidence based on the secret testimony of the miserable souls who now know, as you do, the true story of what happened.

I have no funny way to end this lesson. How can I? there's no real way to end all of this ... this incredible, devastating, frightening truth. Right now, you will decide your fate by believing in the frighteningly true Eschatology of Wood and doing all that you can, not to racially attack those of a different skin color just because they look foriegn and wear a turban, but to join these organizations and try to stop the biggest enemy we have ... ourselves!