Jeff Mach's Blog, page 18

No Worthy Doom

Vesuvius?
A rude eruction
and it follows
(by history
and induction)

that nothing’s really been
that bad; you’re simply spoiled.
Be glad.

The world is all;
you’re puny-small.

The world is broke;
you’re Diet Coke.

The world is hopeless,
and you are copless.

Every poem that makes you depressed
Has reached into your mind (recessed!)
and (consider yourself blessed!)
smashed the illusion you’ve been happinessed.

All is horror. But that’s fine.
Believe in yourself?

No. Don’t crosee that line.

You’re here to suffer, and that’s fine.

And someday, Satan will say,
“God, I love your sugary spine.”

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A Hades-Related Note

Once upon a time, there was a Devil who had reached extraordinary heights, despite the fact that he was rather young.

Some of his ideas upset other devils. Quite a lot of other devils, really. Most of them, even.

But a small clique of very angry Devils thought he was the bee’s knees. They lauded him as a hero.

Unfortunately, they believed that the only reality was what they saw, and if they saw something in a particular way, it must be objective truth.

One day, the young devil woke up to find that dozens of devils had claimed he was an agent of Heaven. Dozens more claimed he had done tons of nice things for the Damned. Some even said he was kind to his co-workers.

This, of course, could not stand.

So they destroyed him. It took a long time and a lot of brimstone, but they eventually reduced his body to component items.

After that, they were all very happy.

For about 30 seconds. Then they realized they weren’t happy at all.

They looked at each other. They looked around. One said, muttering, but distinctly:

“The problem must be that this curse isn’t limited to any one Devil. It could be in any of us…except we righteous, of course.”

Then one of the righteous sneezed.

“WHAT’S THAT?” said someone near her. “That sneeze sounded SUSPICIOUSLY similar to the eruction of that one devil we disintegrated.”

And snarling, they tore her to pieces. And they found someone left-handed, and tore-him to pieces. They found someone who liked to use the word “indubitably”, and ate him.

But no matter how many horrible troublemakers they encountered, there were always more.

Always.

More.

Some of the devils gave up. This was proof that they were part of the problem; you won’t see them again.

Some of them wept and screamed. You can still see them on the Interent.

A few left Hell altogether, claiming that Hell “wasn’t nice”.

But everyone knew that last group was crazy.

If a given place isn’t nice enough to dismember and defenestrate anyone ever accused of violating proprieties and norms, then it can’t be a nice place at all. Presumably all the ones who left were miserable.

And so, the ever-shrinking species of devils persisted and lived on, in an atmosphere of fear, accusals, reprisals, and madness.

That wasn’t exactly “Happily Ever After”–but hey, what is?

 

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What’s on the menu at Monsteria?(The most gourmet creatur...

What’s on the menu at Monsteria?
(The most gourmet creature food in the local area).

Slug soup, with extra leeks
Rusty door, with extra creeks
A thousand sparrows with sharpened beeks,
and a dish of vanilla ice cream.

Fried juvenile miscreant,
Imported tears from a career mis-spent,
Ironically wood-smoked Ent,
and a dish of vanilla ice cream.

Bubbly, foamy Atlantean coffee,
Time-travelling Kantean toffee,
And soothing kava, if you’re feeling wrothy,
oh,
and vanilla ice cream.

If you think these meals are a mite unpleasant
If you don’t prefer human flesh to pheasant,
If you prefer your insects uneaten,
If you don’t use River Lethe to sweeten,

Shut off every thought and dream,
Stifle (in advance) a scream
If you think these foods are unseemly,
you should see what’s in
the vanilla
ice cream.

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On A Pleasant Holiday Note, We’re All Doomed

Yes, that’s right, it’s me, Santa, the only Eldrich Horror who really DIGS human culture!

That IS unusual. Most of us (not that I think of anyone else as ‘us’; the kinship and affinity roles within Those Who Cannot And Must Never Be Conceived are really quite complicated)—why, most of us are too obscure in our theory-of-mind to even view our own existence, our own sentience, as you tiny, insignificant beings might. But not me.

I LOVE elves! They’re yummy!

I LOVE making presents! The more time you humans spend consuming your own temporal existence with meaningless trinkets, the more those of us who enjoy your perpetual state of internal anguish can enjoy how you feel about EVERY SECOND you waste on stupid, pointless distractions away from oblivion.

OBLIVION? Hah! You WISH! You’ll be spending forever in the vast, unspeakable jellied-monstrosity which foolish humans consider “my belly”.

I do adore humans. You know, many of you think the “chimney” thing is a metaphor or a joke. You feel that way, until the chimney appears in your home…

….and there I am.

There I always am.

Because it is always Christmas.

And Christmas is always The End.

Doom.

Doom.

Doom.

HO HO HO.

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“Ghosts From The Past”

“Ghosts from the past should remain in the past.” 

 ~Vampire Hunter Dee

For quite some time, it was entirely possible to believe that the people who were trying to make me unreal believed that they could do so. I mean, drive me to death? Some people probably knew me so poorly they believed that. Drive me to go underground? Oh, I considered it, for a bitter time.

Incompetent enemies are strange. Attempting to simply deny, in every way, that someone was real, or that anything that person did was real, seldom works out well. This is as true for artists as it is for monstrous dictators. Monstrous dictators, if ignored, come back.

Artists, if you attempt to unperson them, will just unperson you right back.

Sometimes, I’m asked if I have compassion for the people who lied about me. My answer is that I don’t think most of them lied: I think they’ve absolutely chosen to live in a world where they’d rather believe in bad things that didn’t happen, rather than being happy.

People sometimes ask me if I’m going to get my revenge, if I’m going to do something worse to my opponents than what they do to themselves.

They’re ghosts from the past, sticking around, tormenting themselves with what they want the world to have been, rather than dealing with what it is.

This can’t last long. You can paint over cracked and peeling plaster, but no amount of paint will fix the way you took down a few load-bearing pillars with a sledgehammer.

Some people think I’m their worst enemy. I just want to reassure them:

“As long as YOU’RE around, no-one will ever be a worse enemy to you than you are.”

Somehow, this seldom cheers them up.

 

 

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Better Bad Poetry Than Good

One might say it’s better to write bad poetry than no poetry.

But this is, in the modern world, a specialized view. The encoded language of poetics has, as Mario Puzo noted, slim chance at impact when you can get the same force from a movie without even half the same pain.

Maybe not even a third.

This is the time for the kind of poetry that burns into your soul, the kind of poetry which would never, ever use a phrase as awkward as “the kind of poetry that burns into your soul”.

But all that poetry’s already been written.

My recommendation?

There’s a lot of terrible poetry out there. Always has been. Some of it has a good beat.

You could read that, but reading’s hard.

My suggestion?

Wait for someone to make it into a song.

Hear it in the background of a commercial for deep-fried junk food.

Enjoy it.

Eat the junk food.

Junk food is delicious.

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Dragon Brain Notes

For in an inappropriately long amount of time, he truly believed that Magic was, in essence, primarily the merger, joining, and collision of two factors: Word, and Name. (Predictive models matter; you can believe, if you want, that the true Thaumaturgical source in the Universe; but you’d best be prepared to die in a sea of treacle.

It was not forgivable—not in the eyes that mattered, his own—that he’d viewed things so naively. When someone relies on some depth of knowledge, and you have not dug deeply enough, then you end up with a lot of dirt, a hole that’s too small, and a lack, not simply of rubies and precious metals, but even with a coherent idea of what the hole was actually supposed to contain in the conveyance of this concept; let’s just bury the whole thing and start over, okay?

Wishful thinking is, in the long run, fatal, and while fatality is common to most sentience, wishful thinking is particularly likely to shorten lifespan in ways which is pleasant only to other sentients who are watching from a safe and considerable distance, and primarily for amusement purposes. Improper use of Magic is the kiss—not of death, since “death” is oftentimes quite forgiving, relatively speaking.. It’s more like the kiss of a leprechaun: spritely, warm, summoned by merry thoughts, and guaranteeing that your almost-cold corpse will be robbed by nightfall.

And for what he’d consider an inappropriate amount of time, he’d even believed all of that.

Oh, it wasn’t wrong. Just thinking too small.

Magic is the intersection—no, the merger or joining or collision—of Word and Name. It was not forgivable, in the eyes that mattered (his own) that let his own ideas become so limited simply because they worked. He couldn’t recognize folly, any more than Faeries recognize the magnetic pull of the Moon; but he knew Wishful Thinking when he saw it. When it comes to Magic, that’s the kiss—not of death, since death is often (sometimes!) forgiving of such things….but at least the smooch of a succubus on a one-night stand: spritely, warm, sweet, and guaranteeing that your almost-cold corpse will be robbed by daybreak.

 

 

 

He’d once felt, for potions and their ilk, that utter contempt which is the particular province of those who seek truth through the faraway visions of telescopes, never considering that there might be something simple and worthwhile in the everyday life they led. He’d assumed they were part of the magical structure he knew best and found most meaningful, and only began to change that when his colleagues were turned into hands, fleas, rocks, fleas infesting rocks, and giant smears of mud and blood. Something in the back of his head whispered, gently, “WRONG, YOU IDIOT!”

This is when he began to pay attention.

An alienist or other brain-chirurge would have asked why he was so obsessed with the deep imperfections of his own metaphysics, but ffbelieved them fundamentally sound, while he hated the mysticisms of most others, would have led him shout “BECAUSE I’M BASICALLY HUMAN, YOU NINCOMPOOP!”—an answer which would have likely annoyed them both.

This is when he began to pay attention.

It takes a true wise man to know that he is a fool, a true fool that he is wise, and a nitwit to believe that he is likely to make an accurate self-assessment of either quality. But spotting generally terrible belief systems is not incredibly difficult, so long as you don’t start off with the inherently terrible belief system that you’re right.

One of the leading points of poor predictive models is magical thinking about things which do not involve magic. That is, one’s belief in faerie tales ought to be modified, at least somewhat, by whether or not one has a room in the basement dedicated to the carefully-taxidermified remains of malevolent elves. Otherwise, magical thinking is mainly a way of digging yourself a narrow grave with your own words and hopes.

In this wide Multiverse, Magic obeys precisely one being conclusively, appreciatively, to the letter, and without consequences resulting from irony or a complete lack of caring. And if you ever figure out who that being is, RUN!

It’s a long and difficult road, but in the end, almost nobody finds it rewarding. Because Magic may be suspicious and capricious, but it definitely finds your soul Magically Delicious.

Be warned.

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Worshipping The Truest Gods

There must be only one true Godhead, and that is lies.

For why else would we worship lies with such desperate fervor?

The time of Miracles is past; surely we believe in them no longer. So miraculous indifference is the closest we can come to the Divine.

Who hates the Divine as much as we do?

I know you, Gil. I know you, Andy. And what do I hope, day upon day?

That you truly believe your own lies.

If there is a God, God hates you, I think. If there is no God, there is a Satan, and you are his children.

This is fiction. Any resemblance to any persons living, dead, or deserving of one or both options, is purely coincidental.

 

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There Is No Darkness But…

It’s said that there is no darkness but ignorance, and that’s one hell of a relief.

Because I figured I was simply wearing sunglasses and forgot how to take them off.

I thought night fell and the stars simply forgot to come out.

I thought we were all in a closet and the only light was broken.

But truly, ignorance shines dark as shadow. It radiates outwards from every screen. The full moon, if we think it drives us mad, is nothing but a source of ink; the blessed sun gives heat, but apparently lights only plants.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

There is no ignorance except everywhere.

There is no everywhere when everything is dark.

As for me, I’ve invested in words, the flashlights of the mind.

It’s not a bad life. It’s a weird life, but I can live with that.

~Jeff Mach

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On Being Devoured By Invisible Demons

It’s said that the author of the Necronomicon was devoured in broad daylight by invisible demons.

This leads us to rather a lot of questions, not the least of which, if you happen to live in the current era, is “Wait a minute! How can I get devoured by invisible demons?”

Also, invisible to whom, exactly? I mean, if they were invisible to everyone, how do we know they were demons? Actually, how do you have a crowd savvy enough to detect demons, but NOT savvy enough to try to banish them?

(Although it’s also possible that do-gooder wizards were held back by Amazon, which realized that the book would sell much better after its author was consumed.)

And what kind of demon? And why devoured? Were they particularly hungry? One figures that, if there are demons in the world, and they eat people, it would happen more than once, right?

Unless, of course, they have very slow metabolisms, like boa constrictors. Maybe they only need to eat, oh, every 500 years or so.

In which case…

Perhaps they’re on their way even now!

QUICK!

QUICK!

Put down your phones; that death is slower than devouring, but more painful.

Abandon your worst life choices. They, too, might lead to an escape from this timeline, but again, it takes SO LONG.

No, clearly this is the time to begin serious study of the occult.

It’s well-known that serious studies of the Unseen Arts lead to three places: Madness, death, or (rarely!) great power.

Reasonably speaking, ALL of those are probably quite a lot more fun than what you’re currently experiencing, surely?

Best of all, while we don’t seem to have any real Necronomicons on the market, there are a number of great fakes available. All of them are either stupid (ie, all the Summonings…none of the Bindings)–or else they’re wholly fake. And if working very hard to learn a magical system that doesn’t exist won’t drive you into a state of deliciously weird insanity, I don’t know what will.

This has been a Dark Lord Life Hack. If this helps you, pass it on to a friend. Or, as more likely with my readers, one (or more) of your many enemies.

Have a darkling, doomed day!

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