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18 May 2007, 10:15
Some unrecallable dark hour last night I read H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", lights out, hunched naked in a ratty pagan blanket, aspersing myself with virgin billygoat's blood from a pewter goblet and reciting the 216 letters of God's true name in reverse, and with a French accent, but not once was I horrified, appalled, astonished, weirded out, struck dumb or blessed with glossolalia, inexplicably or disconcertingly corybantic, sweating errantly, upset, peevish, delirious, dismayed, or bored. Not bored enough to quit reading, anyway. The story's fine, although, if you haven't read it yet, I would recommend you price local virgin goat's blood before investing in the afforementioned ceremonial accessories. The experience might not be worth the cost. More banal ceremonies could provide sufficiently spooky ambiance, such as sitting in a darkened toilet with candles or riding the bus after sunset alone.
The thing about the Cthulhu cult I don't understand is this: they worship and sacrifice and otherwise zealously urge to raise Cthulhu, who is dead or sleeping under the sea in a geometrically mercurial stone town large enough to house mountain-sized eldritch great old gods from the stars like himself, who, if raised, will in all likelihood devour their and our immortal souls and cause much loss of property. More than war and storms. Because he's evil. Unequivocally.
On second thought (my second of the day—the first being "gosh, does that look diseased?"), as Lovecraft describes the cult as predomilately comprising Africans, Aboriginals, Mestizos, Portuguese, white poor, and other unfortunate products of genotypically abominating practice, if the Great Old One (GOO) first eats those that summon him, then they might unwittingly (for how could they suspect, given their diminutive intellects? On second thought, given that their capacity for intelligence is only marginally superior to that of the mute beast, how could they even have such a rich oral tradition as the babble of the Cthulhu chants? Could this be a constitutional flaw in the story?) commit a kind of mass suicide, or autogenocide, through awakening Cthulhu. Which, for the species, could be just the kind of culling we need to really kickstart Utopia. And because Cthulhu is a wussy in battle (in the story, two sailors ram him head-on with a boat and he dissipates into a mist of reeking ectoplasm), when he finishes with the fodder and comes for the—please indulge my ribald humor, it will be brief!—creamier races, we could just blow him up.
On second thought—I guess it's technically the fourth—without the ruddier races around to drive me to work in the morning and dump the wastebaskets, how could we demonstrate par example to our (would certainly be more wholesome) posterity the profound advantages of homogenization? And the quick and clean annihilation (no blood on our hands! Maybe some ectoplasm, but what's that?) of the scurf that precipitated our advancement to our destined apogee position of, oh gee, let us say, crémier premier, tee hee? They would have to take our word for it. And we—we're all gentlemen and grown ups here—know that naked faith ain't worth its weight in evaporated holy water. Quelle conundrum, eh?!
Anyway, I was solicited by a hooker last night!
After finishing "The Call of Cthulhu", it was late, round about midnight, and I went running. Because I've been bogglingly lazy the past two weeks, I haven't been running regularly. Because of that or because of the six dark beers and plates of super nachoes with extra refried beans which was my dinner, I had a bad cramp. The last two lengths of block to my building, I decided, after sprinting up a hill from beach to street level and letting explode a miasmia of particular excrement the city will not experience for another hundred years, I would walk.
So I was walking and noticed another walker at the far end of the block coming across the street toward me. She was wearing a long-sleeve flannel shirt, tight blue jeans, and flappy yellow flip-flops—just the type of look I regularly go for—and stopped at the corner, underneath the streetlight. She kind of edged closer to the light pole as I approached. Thinking she might be a dangerous paranoid, and wanting to avoid that hazard, I edged closer to the buildings. But, not wanting to seem stand-offish, I looked up at her anyway.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi," she said, and twitched.
As I passed her, she whirled around after me and asked "Where you going?" in a high and urgent tone.
I turned my head, said "Home!", and ran blind into the street where I was nearly hit by a passing minivan.
Thus: never neglect to look both ways.
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