High Weird With Jesus

I've been waiting to hear back from several publications and a job; today instead I got mail from these folks.

They are, by all accounts, Evangelical mail fraud, complete with fake "testimonies" and a groovy "prayer rug" Jesus who OPENS HIS EYES AS YOU LOOK AT HIM. (He really does!)*

I cannot adequately express how delighted I am with this. I was the kind of child who was very knowledgeable about parapsychology and cryptozoology, and when I was in high school, I had a copy of High Weirdness by Mail by Ivan Stang...a veritable cornucopia of crazy shit I thought was cool. Some of it was more respectable than the rest: I joined the L5 Society as a teenager, and later (after L5 merged with the National Space Institute) the National Space Society . For many years I had an NSS t-shirt. But while I took some of it more seriously than others, I adored all the weirdness equally, from Loompanics to the Erisian Liberation Front. Some people, when presented with the degree of creativity, resilience and occasional confabulation with which human beings face the irreducible problems of existence, the amount of wild-ass inventiveness and sheer effort they put in, feel pity, contempt, or despair. I think it's awesome. Whatever floats your boat down the river of life, buddy.

I discovered, in the process of writing this, that there's now High Weirdness by Web. It is a sad shadow of the print book, since the snarky entries were half the glory; also I don't find the whole SubGenius schtick as funny as I used to....something to do with my ex-husband. But it serves to remind me of things I haven't thought about in a while, along with some new ones I had yet to discover. For example, there's Factsheet5, which reviewed the 'zine** I was Graphics Editor of back in the day. I also used to talk to Kerry Thornley while hanging out in the square in Little Five Points in the 80s. I bought a signed copy of the Principia Discordia from him for $5. The book was last seen at a meeting with my oldest niece, some doughnuts and a plushie Cthulhu, and has subsequently disappeared.

Anyway, so now I have this paper Jesus eye-opening "prayer rug." I think I am going to send it back to them and see what happens.


*It's an optical illusion created by the way the image is drawn. Someone put serious effort into that.
** Planetary Previews Magazine. Many's the tale of madcap adventure I could tell.