Don't Make Me Turn This Cult Around

In my five years as your infallible leader of this group and overseer of the Bobbstown Bake-Off and Chilifest, I've never seen such a lack of respect. Do me a favor and think back to before you came to live on this compound. Remember all of those promises? Now tell me I didn't follow through on them. A life, where you're free from persecution for your personal beliefs and the way you run weird. A home, where a fresh sack of grain is delivered every Wednesday afternoon, provided you "kept it together" during your most recent mock execution. Free and open communication with your family back home using one of three form letters. All this, and how do you repay me? A few magazine reporters land here to take some photos, and suddenly you're all "Oh, I'm not ready to die!" when I break out the cyanide-laced pecan sandies. Sometimes I wonder why I even started this cult.

To serve the interests of the Bobbstown community at large, I've instituted a suggestion box where you can submit your comments anonymously. This way, I can approach them with an unbiased mind before I send all dissenting submissions to our handwriting analysis and torture team. And I'll tell you, once I demanded over the P.A. system for all of us to meet at the "mass poisoning event," you people were just full of great ideas. Let's take a look at this one.

"I don't want the poison to hurt." Well, that's just silly. To make the process easier, we've baked the poison into a delicious array of pecan sandies. Just wash it down with a warm glass of milk, and that's all there is to it. And if you don't like cookies, the milk is poisoned as well. After that, it's just like laying down and going to sleep -- provided that most of you experience horrific, stabbing bowel pains before meeting Mr. Sandman every night. If you're still not all poisoned up, well, we also have an entire table of extremely sharp and moderately decorative daggers to plunge into your midsections. My advice is to grab that wavy one with the snake hilt before someone else does.

"Let's not die and do something else instead." Okay, it looks like we are really not on the same page, here. People, we are planning a revolutionary "I told you so" moment for the world to witness. I may have only received an eighth grade education, but six of those years involved a campaign of beatings and intimidation by a certain classmate named Thomas Blasky. You might not know who he is, but when he finds out 700 of you took your own lives on my command, well, I think it'll really fuck with his head.

"Some of us should stay alive to tell your story." Um, hello? You think anything you write is going to hold a candle to a headline that reads "700 DEAD IN BOBBSTOWN SANDY DISASTER?" Of course not. I am writing this story with my actions, people! Also, I have left several copies of my multi-volume autobiography for federal agents to pore over when they find our bloated corpses. Volume 7 even includes exhaustive descriptions of an alternate timeline where we don't all poison ourselves. Eternal happiness, peace, brotherhood, et cetera. Hey, I bet in that reality we have a microwave that doesn't keep tripping the circuit breaker, am I right? By the way, we'll need someone standing by to help out with that because we're going to be microwaving a lot of poison very soon.

Okay people, we're not going to have shock value going for us if those photographers come here and find you suppressing the last flickers of your self-preservation instincts with embarrassing crying and vocalized regrets. Let's just pull one more from the box: "I don't think we're killing ourselves enough." Oh, you don't have to tell me who this is from. Phyllis, stand up and take a bow -- she's the lovely lady who spent all day baking those pecan sandies. Now, before you bite in, just be warned: they do have pecans in them, so watch out if you have a nut allergy.

– Reverend Robert Bobbs