Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 03:27:32 GMT
Reprinted with permission from 'On and On About It: An Oral History of the
Church of the SubGenius' (SubGenius Foundation, Dallas 2179)
excerpt, Track A13, Rev. Dr. Onan Canobite (1966 - 2093)
The majority of us were gathered in the Pavilion by the time we reached
the quarter 'til Rupture mark. There was neither panic nor pageant -
while some were dressed for interstellar travel, others were dressed in
their morning grubbies (and some were not dressed at all - they, the
Dobbsclad tribe, may have been among the most faithful).
Reverend Ivan Stang led the countdown in the final seconds. And at 7:00
am, as the final "O" of "Fuck 'em if they cant take a joke" echoed on
forever, the saucers arrived.
As the silver disks materialized above us they blotted out the sun and
rustled the leaves and limbs of the nearby trees. Three of them were so
close I could see the rivets and plates on their underbelly as they hummed
and circled the compound. Some applauded, a few wept, all looked to the
heavens. We were ready to go home.
At that moment, far off on the Field of Valor, I saw J. R. "Bob" Dobbs in
conference with a diminutive olive green humanoid. The alien held up
three digits, Dobbs responded with two. The alien paused, then stamped
its foot in agreement. They touched faces and hands and Dobbs received a
large black briefcase from the skycritter.
With a rasp, two-foot crescent shapes opened in irregular patterns on the
saucers surface. A golden dust fell upon our upturned faces, almost with
its own intelligence. The pollen burned our eyes and skin, and all was
lost in tears. But in that moment came the Rupture.
Like the skin peeling from an old rotten tomato, I felt some part of me
pulled away and toward the saucers. Its color was dull and heavy, and as
it pulled from my feet upward it caught most on my sex and my spine, my
shoulders and my face, until it popped inside out and away. On its face,
a mirror of my own, were two great polyps; they stared at me like a
wounded and cowardly predator driven from its lair as the empty shell was
yanked feet-first toward the flying saucers.
The crescent portals sealed themselves, our sullen sleeves inside. The
saucers began to rotate in sync and then whispered away. I saw "Bob"
driving off in a golf cart, his briefcase forgotten in the field.
As happened so often in my happy service to the Church of the SubGenius,
nothing turned out quite like I thought it would but in the end it was so
much better. I looked about me and saw pastel oil slick auras around
people's heads and bodies for the first time since I was a child. I saw
freshly scrubbed happy faces and cones of blue and silver energy flowing
out of peoples palms, great red breathing spirals radiating and spiraling
in to their hearts. There was laughter all about; we saw the world as it
truly is.
In the years to come we affected many miracles in the name of the Church.
We could tell when our co-religionists were in danger and sped to their
aid. We abolished work for many of our kind and even a few of the humans.
We communicated without wires or waves across great distances, and held
the most ennobling and amusing of gatherings. And we learned the true
meaning of what the prophets had told us long ago: "The SubGenius Must
Have Slack." This was not a declaration of some commodity we would have
to buy in the future, but a definition of who we are now. Just as a meal
must include food to be 'a meal,' the SubGenius must have slack. We got
slack, enough to go around and then some.
We _did_ go home, after all. And it was to the home we had always been
told we could never go back to. Our indulgence and our innocence had made
peace; our fate and our faith cohabitated. We were healed and made whole,
we went to heaven without dying first.
The Men from Planet X had taken away not our persons but our pains. Their
advanced technologies separated our souls from the parasites and tumors
that infected them. They took away our hurts and smoothed our scars. And
they left us with new gifts, both fair and foul.
I don't know if our new cutting vision, our scissors of sight, is an
ability added to our minds and bodies by the X-ists or if by their
cleansing we were simply restored to a level of sensation that all once
shared. Irregardless, all SubGenii at X-Day have claimed and demonstrated
a heightened sense of awareness and psychic connectivity without parallel
in Church history or even Earth history. This was the fair gift of the
X-ists, the gift of sight.
But what sights we have seen. Like a traveler in a foreign lands made
abruptly aware of the insults of his hosts, our unfiltered vision has made
us aware of horrors previously confined to Z-grade cinema. The X-ists had
left their most harmful of partially invisible technologies and species
behind for the humans to abuse, and when we returned home the abuses
began.
Unseen by the humans around us, we are now only too aware of the
glistening insect armor that most mortals wear, its tubers lodged deep in
the muscles and throats of their bodies. We see the robot monkey demons
that ride men's backs, driving them to cruelty and to combat with the
demon monkey robots that hang from women's necks, staring them in the face
all day. Plague fogs rust and rot the cities, long-legged angels with
burned wings bolt colored hoods to human heads. Coal burning dinosaurs
and firecats destroy the forests. And behind it all, The Conspiracy.
Once hidden and operating behind the scenes, they now traded openly in
mortal suffering.
Were we given eyes to see only to see Hell itself? To grow new dark
shells for the X-ists to harvest each X-Day? It must not be so. Our
mission, though nameless, was ordained: the SubMission of planet Earth.
Of course we started off on the wrong foot. We used the money that "Bob"
had forgotten (or left behind for us, some said) to process the films and
edit the tapes of X-Day. And each package that came back from the labs
showed not the experience we'd shared but one altogether more mundane;
vat-bred actors or biomatons resembling those who were there, standing
around, talking. Examination of the remaining funds revealed all the
bills were marked - with regret, we destroyed them lest any future project
be likewise marked for Conspiracy tampering.
Our 'proof' of X-Day, once so self-evident, was gone. Some few spoke the
plain truth about The Conspiracy, and our lawyers are still petitioning
for their release. We could not show evidence for what we had seen, nor
could we share our visions with those who did not share them already.
Dobbs failed to return our messages for many years, and the SubGenii were
scattered around the country and around the world. We had each other,
we could see what the problems were, we had some of the tools to fix
things, but nobody believed something like X-Day could be real. What were
we to do?
-O.
--
Rev. Dr. Onan Canobite - SubGenius since 1982 - onan@subgenius.com
Send One Dollar to http://www.subgenius.com/ for Eternal Salvation
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