Campfyre Stories

So…

My mom used to live in this mansion in the ghetto.  From before she moved in and while she lived there, it was always set up as a communal household.  I don’t know the full history, but originally it was something like a boarding house for mariners when they came to port.

Big old house, some 13/14 rooms with 3.5 bathrooms (one was closed up, though), rich with history, possibly haunted, roomy and always filled with activity, but…  It was also filled with mold, and kind of falling apart, and the owner or maybe the company that rented it wouldn’t make the necessary improvements.  After living there for some 10 years, mom and company all moved out.

Why am I telling you this?  Heh.

Well, apparently one of my mother’s former housemates knows a contractor who has been doing work on that house since they moved out.  (It was really so unbelievably bad that there was no possible way they could get away with renting it without serious renovations).  He was told that, despite the mold, etc, there had been a cult living (squatting?) in that house for some time.

From here, I started getting the story from various people, but it turns out that it was a schizm of the Church of the Subgenius (aka Church of Bob).  Now I had never heard of the "Church of Bob", but when my mom went online and started looking for information, she found their real name, Church of the Subgenius, which, pretty much, anyone who’s been as much involved on the internet as I am, has heard this name, even if they don’t know exactly what it means.  The Wikiality entry (Stephen Colbert’s truthiness wiki) actually puts it in much friendlier, pop-culture terms and lists it as "one of the four great centers of the internet".

But I had no idea that little pockets of actual cultists existed, let alone in my area, let alone living in my mom’s old commune house (although it’s pretty fitting, no?).  My insatiable curiosity and ultimate goal in life to Know All Things has led me to do some research and, I have to say, silly though it may be, I like what these people are preaching, especially about "legal Conspiracy marriages", which pretty much sums up how I already feel about that particular topic.

My family agreed that my father should have been a member of this church, but in all honesty, the more I read about it, the more I realize that all of the irreverent, random, insane, slackers that I know (and, per the "threat to normalcy" post, I know a LOT of them) pretty much ARE, whether they realize it or not.  Not an actual cultist, per se (I, for one, tend to not affiliate and don’t actually *worship* at all.  It’s just not in me), but a part of the underlying spirit of the whole thing.  Not on purpose, not in any kind of organized fashion, simply in ways that are compatible without needing to be defined, labeled and belonging.

So I find it fitting (weird, but fitting) that of all the cultists in the world, these are the ones that found the old Mariner’s house and decided to set up camp there, at least for a little while.  It seems like the sort of thing that continues the spirit of what that house has been for a long time.