Thursday, February 22, 2007

My Life in the Wellington Cthulhu Cult

Here's a little gem that I've been sitting on since my trip home for winter break.
Deep in the underbelly of south central Kansas lies a little village named Wellington. Wellington is populated almost entirely with the psychotic religious, the morbidly obese, the mentally challenged, and the vagrant elderly. It should be noted that in south central Kansas there is a non-trivial intersection amongst these groups. I got the joy of spending 1 hour in the Wellington Wal-Mart waiting for my flat tire to be fixed. Why don't you take it somewhere else, you ask? Because, like many small towns with a Wal-Mart, there is nowhere else. As a result I got to spend about 45 minutes at ground zero for what my sister affectionately refers to as the "mutard invasion." After being rescued by my sister, we drove around Wellington searching for the particular piece of small town Americana that is "the Screamin' Jesus." A little explanation is probably due here. Having already exhausted their store of respectable, recognized churches (and I'm even including the Assemblies of God in this list), Wellington decided to start making up their own. One of these is the "Joy Fellowship Church." It occupies a rickety multi-story house behind an auto repair shack's parking lot. I can only assume that the Joy Fellowship Church is devoted to the worship of Lovecraftian elder gods, given its quaint decoration. You see, someone has decided to hang a giant painting of Jesus on the side of the church. It's visible from the highway, and it's been painted by someone who's never seen an actual human being! Without further ado, here it is:



Ia! Ia! Shub-Nigurrath! The goat with a thousand young! There's something very scary about the eyes and mouth of Jesus (which is not something I thought I would ever have to say in my entire life...thank you Joy Fellowship). I don't know if it comes through in the picture, but they've used an incredibly black shade of black for Jesus' pupils and gaping maw, resulting in the distinct feeling that behind his malformed mask, Jesus is a cackling void of absolute vacuity. Maybe that's what they were going for. It's worth pointing out that the face in the photo is at least 15 feet tall.

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