Imagine my chagrin this morning when I saw perched ominously atop my usual stack of Gmails complaining about my use of extreme profanity on Good Reads, a Google text ad: “Hearing Random Voices? www.ChurchOfStMarks.com – Take the Demon Test To Find Out Now If You’re In Need of an Exorcism!”
Um, excuse me, but — like I need a “Demon Test” to tell me if I’m in need of an exorcism? I was a kid in the ’70s. I know fucking well that if I need an exorcism, I won’t get a memo from the Jesus Freaks; the spewing pea soup and a higher-than-usual quantity of priests hurtling out my window will probably be my first clues.
Had I not thought to myself, “What part of the country produces numbskulls like this” and run a WhoIs on the URL, I might have actually have imagined I was turning into a Giant Slug like Leslie Nielsen in this second-season Night Gallery episode I still occasionally have nightmares about. The answer is, Santa Monica, which is a dead giveaway.
Have you ever been to Santa Monica? It is about a hundred feet square and its most notable features are a carousel and a Ferris wheel. There are no crazy religious people in Santa Monica; the wackiest churches there believe perfectly reasonable things about how the President of the Galactic Federation brought billions of people to Earth in DC-8’s and blew them up using hydrogen bombs. All the holy rollers are elsewhere in Los Angeles County.
Santa Monica? You know who’s in Santa Monica? Strike Entertainment, apparently, who screened the Eli Roth produced mockumentary horror flick The Last Exorcism at Sundance et al, and are releasing it August 27.
But hey, who can say no to online quizzes, whether the topic is which Sopranos character I am (Paulie Walnuts, duh) or when I’ll die (last year, on a Tuesday, apparently). Oh, but there’s so much more to The Church of St. Marks and The Last Exorcism than just taking a quiz to determine whether I’m swapping brain juice with Azazel, Pazzuzu or Sonny Barger.
By answering honestly such questions as “Has this person ever been involved with the occult?” and “… seem to be obsessed with movies or books about Satan?” and “… overindulge in food?” and “… spend most of their time alone at home?” and “…spend inordinate amount of time on the internet/computer?” and “… seem obsessed with sex and/or pornography?” — and, of course, the gimme if your Holy Roller Mom is the one filling this out: “… often complain of being persecuted by others?” — well, let’s just say that:
You may be afflicted with a demon known as KATAL
Katal is the demon of jealousy and bitterness – he’s the spitting image of Lucifer his master who rebelled against the true God. He finds his way into the hearts of those who are envious of those around them, who think ill of family, friends and neighbors. Signs: those possessed by Katal will have violent mood swings, they will have a cold, clammy sweat and most frighteningly, may bleed from the eyes. Those around the possessed may hear a menacing, whispered voice with no obvious source.
Oh, sure, fuckers, you can laugh, but you’re not the one with a derived SI unit for expressing quantity values of catalytic activity of enzymes and other catalysts crawling up your ass and whispering “Rosebud!” into your ear, with those occult weirdos the General Conference on Weights and Measures backing it up. And while we’re at it, you’re not the ones being persecuted by others, right?
If you get similar results, you can fill out an application for exorcism or take the same online class in viral marketing that these folks did.
In that event…see you in Hell.
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