When X-Day happened on July 5 1998 I was living in Dallas, which was a holy city for the Church of the SubGenius. Leading up to X-Day various evangelists had graffiti’d the face of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs on everything, everywhere around. I acquired some religious pamphlets and took to the faith. I have been a SubGenius ever since and am happy to be registered in the Book of Humans. I just saw that there is an upcoming SubGenius documentary in development and I am excited for it.
I met “Bob” more than once. When I saw his face I should have recognized him. At the time, I thought he was just some guy and only realized who he was in hindsight.
One time when I met him I was at a coffeehouse on my computer. “Bob” came in and asked me if he could borrow my laptop because he urgently had to edit an article on Wikipedia. Normally I would not let a stranger do this, but I nodded and he took my laptop into the restroom. I was not paying attention at first but there was only the one toilet, and when a line began to form, people started commenting that whoever was in there was repeatedly flushing the toilet in an aggressive way.
When he came out of the restroom a cloud of smoke billowed into the coffeeshop from behind the the just opened door. Suddenly, everyone who had been in line for the restroom no longer needed relief, and instead, most of them got in line for coffee and scones. “Bob” did not give my computer back to me, but somehow as “Bob” was running to exit my computer did come to be back in front of me without him returning it. It was on the logout screen of Wikipedia so I do not know what he edited but it also had opened a mapping application and seemed to have been searching for the location of the coffeehouse which he was already inside.
Since I had not yet realized that I had encountered “Bob”, I asked the barista if they knew who he was. They replied that they did not, but that when they first saw him they knew exactly what he was about to do. Hours later I told a friend what happened, and when I told the story, I blurted out that I saw “Bob” at the coffeehouse. Before I said this I had not even realized that it was “Bob”, but once the words came out of my mouth, then I realized EVERYTHING.
Through the Church of the SubGenius I took up with a series of great religious leaders and it was a miracle that I endured. The Universal Life Church and its Wiki-style approach to religion is still an inspiration to me and I still have hopes that Theo Chocolate will hold true to its religious roots and advance the SubGenius agenda for spiritual freedom. “Bob” never helped me with these things but I mistakenly thought that he would, so I suppose the misconceptions which inspired me about these situations were still a sort of assistance from “Bob”.