Jeff Mach's Blog, page 7

A Counterspell Against Ignorance

(This spell should be spoken or chanted over a blazing fire. A real one would e nice; a fire in the heart would, however, suffice.)

I will not live in ignorance; I have a right to knowledge.

I will not live in fear, even in fearful times.

I will not let my hatred make me foolish. I will not let foolishness decide my angers.

I will not be part of a mob, even a mob that I think is right. I am an individual; mobs are for ants*.

I am a fighter. Physical, mental, or moral, whichever I can do, whatever I can do, I will fight.

I will not submit to anything or anyone without good reason. I don’t need to fear submission; but I can despise the things to which I’m asked to submit.

I call on no power but my own, and I know it to be enough.

By my heart, I will keep going until I can’t go further. And then I will try my damnedest to go further.

By my soul, I will not let myself be permanently discouraged, no matter what stupidity or malice I experience.

By my eyes, vision clear or cloudy, I will look for what I think is true and workable, not what I think will please the crowd.

The crowd is insane.
The crowd is insane.
The crowd is insane.

I exist. I can be canceled from exterior places, but never from myself.

I exist. I go on. They hate that I do.

And that’s part of why I do.

I swear no oath and make no promise.

I will simply not be bound by chains of mindlessness or willful harm; they are brothers, and they hate Humanity.

I will be free.
I am free.
I am always free.

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

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* credit to Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

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The Chaos Beast

You ought to meet the Chaos Beast;
Of predictable monsters, this one’s the least.
Your sanity’s soon to be cleft;
The Chaos Beast is the one on the left.

I would describe its strange appearance
Except I could barely achieve nearance
The only thing you can predict
Is that whatever you think it is, you’ll feel tricked.

Its many attacks are complicated
To leave you addled and twitterpated
The damn thing’s unpredictability
Mean you can’t guess between clumsiness, and agility.

The Chaos Beast has (x + n)
Where’x’ are legs, and ‘n’ (again)
Is the height of the beast, or maybe Big Ben;
There’s some unpredictability.

The Chaos Beast is quite romantic
But we advise against techniques tantric
Chaos on this high an order
Ought inspire you to run for the nearest border.

What form has the Chaos Beast got?
Easy! Whatever it is not,
Then very soon (assuredly)
That’s the shape that it will be.

Is it made of flesh? Or stone? Or rice?
Whatever it was, it won’t be twice.
Tentacle and slime, discord and rhyme,
Maybe it’s made of nanites. Or liquid essence of Time.

Sometimes we give our brains the thought
That by weirdness we just won’t be caught.
We’re far too serious (I think)
To leap that hill, the Madness brink.

Unless (I guess) (and I suppose),
True Chaos from this strange seed grows:
Anticipation’s the key. What you expect
Will be the form it will neglect.

The Chaos Beast! Discordianly weird!
I’d lend you mine, but it’s disappeared.
Or else (and this is true, as well) –
It’s here and I’m gone.
Who can tell?

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

 

 

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(An Unnumbered Entry In A Dubious Zoological Manuscript On The Subject Of, Approximately, Stories

The Tale-sender is a being from the primary pieces of reality, though it is obviously and pleasantly far, far smokier than it is made of glass.

Tale-senders do not have a single form or shape. That is, they do, for these words; but perhaps for other words, it might be different. Most things are of similar realities, regardless of source of typeface. Tale-senders are not that.

Whence come their stories? Oh, no, no, that’s so very much the wrong question! Story continues to menace us, although it is a pleasant and beloved menace. We’re not generally conscious on an ethereal level, but our ethereal bodies navigate all of the magical spaces which we (as nonmagical beings, in the general) never know exist*, but which are as impassible as pipes of boiling steam would be, on this plane. And they can scarcely move, because the Ethereal Plane is almost entirely occupied by Dream, that very, very useful, very, very fast-growing, that Triffid of the Heavens, that building material which builds itself, vast, vast, iceberg blocks. It’s very hard to move anywhere.

Tale-senders have scythes, big scythes, and are (with great long-learned skill and art) able to cut slices in the Dream substance.

This both permits our bodies to move—and drops the Dream, sometimes, into parts of our heads. Very, very, very, very, very frequently, this is not entirely fatal.

Tale-senders are not making Dream**; they are helping make it such the Dream does not, kudzu-like, take over all reality.

_____

“It’s a little-known fact, but Unicorns are something like 20% paint, and their horns are stolen exclusively from endangered species.”
― Jeff Mach, There and Never, Ever Back Again

You could go here to join my mailing list.

You could find more of my books and other work here on Amazon.

 

 

 

* There are no such things as Faeries, and I’m sorry for the thing that happened at that place, and I wish I could visit that one Faerie ring again.

** By the way, I might be lying. I’m not being cute. I’m really not sure. I’m not lying to YOU. I’m lying to MYSELF.

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The Power Within

The true power, the real power, the power that can be wielded by only one, the Chosen One, the true real correct  powerful chosen one who has the power that is powerful: that has always been you, by which I mean you are the chosen one, and  the power is inside you, that power, that is the power that is in you. Got it? Good. 

It has waited for so long to be unlocked. But all you really had to do was believe in yourself with all of your heart. 

And that can be a difficult thing, for the heart is often divided. Between fear, love, anger, sadness, hope, heartbreak…  Really, there’s basically no room for ventricles or Orioles or whatever else goes inside that organ, so I’m not actually sure how  we continue pumping blood and don’t all just fall down. To be honest, falling down sounds pretty great right about now. 

But it is in your heart, your heart alone, and only your heart. And that is why we had to keep it a secret, and could not  tell you outright. Because your heart is very special. And that gives it just an insane black-market value. Like, I can’t even begin to  guess. Obviously, it is very deeply morally wrong to steal organs from someone, especially a living person who has by no means  consented thereto, especially if the organ is vital to life. But without getting morbid, it is kind of a thing that happens, and we do  need to acknowledge the actuality of it. It is very gross to think about, but not as bad as I imagine what would have happened if  just anybody could have figured out how special your heart is. All I’m saying is, there were reasons why this could not be made as  readily apparent as one might have preferred. Some of those reasons aren’t very nice. That’s how life works. 

You have come so far and done so much! You have vanquished many foes! Try not to let that make you feel too stupid.  I’m sure you were very effective with that little piece of sharpened metal and those cantrips you kept mumbling. All seems a bit  of a waste when you had thermonuclear force right at your disposal, just sort of hanging out in your chest, waiting to be noticed.  But it was very good…stick waving and metal slapping and whatever it was that you were doing. Good job, you! 

I mean it, you have the heart of a true warrior. And we really do miss her. 

What’s that? No, of course this wasn’t originally your hetart. You are fairly small and puny. I mean, it was a genius plan,  right? Sneaking incredible Weaponry right under the nose of the rightful ruler, just by shoving it into you an unprepossessing  young lad, with a c average and no particular known aptitude for anything whatsoever? 

Honestly, putting that weapon into anybody even vaguely threatening was just a dumb idea. Nobody figured you were  going to amount to anything. But you have showed how the small might bring the mighty low! Specifically, by having some sort  of magical thing within your body which has nothing much to do with the rest of you. 

And now, it is a part of you, and will always be a part of you, unless something really gory happens, and I don’t want to  think about that. Sounds very messy. Plus, weapons of belief and willpower are reasonably difficult to replace. 

This is the lesson: true strength comes from within. This is another lesson: the magic is in you. This is a third lesson: you will  always be special because you have a special thing inside. Fourth lesson: Don’t ask what kind of lesson we’re implying about those  who don’t have a sorcerous whatsit implanted in their chests. 

(Or maybe everyone does, which would mean that everyone is special, which means it is the job of each individual to go  off on their own, alone, against impossible odds, to defeat the Dark One. Except that would be impossible, since most of the  passes in the Foreboding Peaks barely have room to fit a very agile mountain goat; throwing the entire mass of humanity there is  just asking to fill the valley with tumbling corpses and, by extension, a never-ending whirlwind of avalanches.) 

Now also know that it doesn’t matter whether you are a large or small, it matters what is inside you! Which would pretty  much mean, logically, that if somebody hasn’t popped some sort of Mojo into your chest, there’s really no point in doing much  of anything. Everyone else can basically just sod right on off. 

Now the time has come to show everyone What You’re Made Of! Which is meat and cartilage stretched over fortified  calcium deposits, liberally sprinkled with organs and plasma. Same as everyone else. 

In conclusion, it is finally your moment! So do it! Call on the power that resides within you! Let all see the glow Within! 

(It was at this point that a blinding white light blasted through the Chosen One’s chest, and immediately exploded,  vaporizing everything within a 10-mile radius and leaving the tiniest speck of Chosen One behind. If you look very closely, you can see that little fragment…no, no, don’t look within your heart, that is just a bad idea. I’m going to put it right where everyone  can see it: on the period at the end of this sentence. 

Shine on, my friends. Shine on.

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The Dungeon Sender (part II)

The figure in the corner never looked up from the drink. This was not considered rude by the other tavern patrons, who were not only fervent proponents of ‘if it’s not at my table, it’s not my problem’, but were also keeping careful opticals on their own beverages, lest some of the more hoary beverages gain abnormal mobility.

Lyra, the Bard, found the whole thing altogether too portentous* to bear. “Who is that clown?” she asked, of her own table.

Mork the Mage tipped her beer, checking it for signs of life or undeath, and replied, with some caution, “That’s no harlequin; that’s our contact.”

(And yet: Did you really know what lay beneath that slightly overlarge cloak? It might well have been harlequin rags and tatters, just waiting for the moment when the wearer decides to hurl their beer-glass into the fire and mazurka upon the tables.)

“Our what?” Lyra replied.

“Contact. The person who’ll tell us how to get to the next dungeon and what we need to do there.”

“And…these people are… reliable?”

Mork looked back at her. “You come from a very small village, don’t you?””

“So one just goes over to the table, and…”

“And the Sender will give you a mission of vital importance.”

“How does the Sender know of so many important quests, and why is this person recruiting in a tavern instead of at the Castle?”

“Have you MET the Queen Mother?”

“Point taken.”

___

In one world, we didn’t hear much of Lyra and Mork. We know they, and the rest of their party, spoke to the Sender. We know that some of their gear apparently wasn’t worth eating, because it showed up a few days later. No sign of Mork or Lyra would be found…unless, obviously, you counted the recipe.

___

But I feel there’s more to the story.

I’ll take you there…

…if you’d like to go on an adventure.

 

 

 

 

* Not to be confused with ‘pretentious’, although, in this circumstance, it’s hard to see why not.

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A Tale of Time Trample

Once upon a time, there was a science fiction author who realized he’d made a terrible mistake inserting time travel into the story you are about to read, and so he travelled back in time and fixed it, and now there’s no damn story, and it’s his fault; I’m sorry. The end. 

…only it turned out not to be the end at all. Because that story was far more inspirational than the author would have expected. Every once in a while, even a mediocre mind, even a mind as mediocre as that particular author, who was, let me tell you, no great shakes when it came to the thinking process, produces a transcendent story, one which changes the hearts and/or minds of thousands of readers. This story would have changed the life of the Galactic-Dictator-To-Be. She would have changed her vicious ways and become a kinder, gentler ruler. But she didn’t and the whole Galaxy suffered; thanks a lot, scifi writer! 

So this could not continue. Thus it was that the writer travelled back in time to re-change the story. Apparently,  something about the writing was so earnest, so heartfelt, so charming (the writer was possibly channeling much better writers from beyond the grave; that’s not a known fact, but it seems the most plausible explanation)—something about the story was  just so good that it really made a difference in the world. So the writer appeared before his former self and explained the  situation. 

Only his former self was unconvinced. Very unconvinced. He kept saying that there’s no way the story could be that  good, and he refused to be convinced that his future self really WAS, in fact, himself. The future self thereby became  unbelievably frustrated, and they argued. Okay, they tussled. Okay, the past self smashed the future self over the head with an  umbrella. Which ordinarily would have been mildly annoying, but happened this time to be fatal. (Umbrellas can be effective  weapons, but you have to use them just right. Or accidentally strike the temple with the one really solid bit, the metal at the end,  and cave in the parietal lobe, and then you have a dead body, your own dead body, lying on the floor of your apartment. Morbid! 

And very awkward. For one thing, the cops are not happy to find that there appears to be an almost-exact duplicate of  you, one who matches your dental records 99.9%, one who has no Social Security Number or record or name, and besides  which, is also a dead body, lying on your floor. 

(Or in the trunk of your car; or out in the swampy bits of the Meadowlands; digging a proper hiding place for a corpse  is quite difficult, and you’re quite likely to get caught, especially since one might have a case of the jitters, or, really, the “nearly  complete and total freak-outs”, because the whole situation is quite traumatic. ) So the cops pull you over, and this is the time to  be grateful that the time machine mechanism is very small, like the size of a watch, because you need to disappear right now. This  is the time to start all over, so the writer travelled back to an hour before he’d showed up to visit himself… 

…only to find himself of himself waiting for himself. “This is an intervention,” he said. 

“What do you mean?” he asked. 

“Didn’t you wonder at all, didn’t you get even a little bit curious, why you didn’t disappear when you killed a version of  yourself which was going to be necessary for there to be a future you?” 

The writer’s hands flew up to his mouth. “Oh, no,” he said. 

“Exactly. There’s only one explanation.” 

“….time can’t really be modified that way, so I didn’t actually kill myself, I just stunned myself?” 

“Nope; and besides, even if that were the case, how would I know that you’re coming?” 

The writer paused. “Uh, no.” 

“There are Temporal Police, who went back and changed things such that there couldn’t be a paradox?” “No, not that, either.” 

“Then what?” 

“The reason your metaphysics don’t matter—the rules of time travel, the metaphysics of how it works, the very  mechanism you use—have all come about because this is a simply terrible story.” 

Here, the writer lost his cool. “That’s it?” 

“Be glad that’s all this is. There are dozens of other problems and paradoxes that are possible here. We could have kept  going over them for a very long time.”

“But there’s no payoff! There’s no satisfaction! And for the record, if the moral here is, “Time travel can really kill the  structure of a story,” there’s not nearly enough meat on those bones. This is just a bunch of arbitrary fourth-wall breaking. It’s  vaguely humorous, but the self-awareness is cutesy, not helpful. This is a rotten story.” 

“I know,” said the writer’s avatar, in sepulcheral tones. “This is a rotten story, and let’s be clear: this was the story that  would have changed the heart and mind of the World Dictator, and started her onto paths that would ultimately have been  better for her, and for the world. That’s a thing which can be done; the right tale can sometimes, though not always, be so  powerful, so meaningful, that it transcends its genre, transcends even the written page and alters a life.” 

“But you,” the writer’s double said, “have written a real piece of junk here. I wouldn’t be this critical, but you are me, and  I just wanted you to understand: 

“Because of you, the world will be crushed under the heavy boot of a vicious psychopath. This person might have gotten  help. This person might have changed their ambitions. Sometimes, great art can be so moving that it makes us into new people;  not always, but sometimes. You had that chance, and you blew it.”  

“I haven’t, yet,” said the writer, quietly. 

And so he went forth—not to change this story, but to try to write better stories.  

His unexplained, unlimited time travel device had done a lot of kinds of damage, but this was the worst thing: 

He’d had a great story, and he lost it. And the real truth was, he might not have cared all that much about the Galactic  Overlord; all he had was his own word for it, and he was about the most unreliable narrator he’d ever met. 

His greatest foolishness, his worst crime, was against himself: he’d thought to find a way to recapture the story by going  to a time wherein the story still existed and hadn’t been vanished by chrononautical forces. 

It’s understandable. If you’ve ever lost a manuscript, lost inspiration, lost the memory of where you were going; or if  you’ve ever wanted something to write itself and still be yours, you are familiar with that urge. 

Not every piece of good art, or even great art, must be the result of struggle; sometimes, inspiration, luck, timing,  and/or other factors combine to produce something which just flows out of you and arrives in the Multiverse as close to  perfection as one can plausibly achieve. But that’s not just rare; it’s very, very unreliable.  

What he needed to do was put in the time, not the time-travel.  

And that’s what he began to do. Perhaps it wouldn’t change anything; but then again, perhaps it would. Predestination is  complicated at best, and is (arguably) a form of locked time-travel in and of itself, and therefore, if time-travel can be thwarted,  so can Fate. 

He wrote. He rewrote. He threw things out. He read. He did odd jobs to make time to write. He went through periods  of failure, periods of giving up, periods of uncertainty. What worked for him might not work for you. 

Sometimes, he took easier paths, or easier ways out; but sometimes, he “ate bitter”, as the old saying goes—that is, he  pushed his way straight into and through difficulties or obstacles. Sometimes he did it because it was the only way he could find to try to write what he wanted, and sometimes it was because he didn’t realize just how difficult a particular path was. 

Maybe he succeeded, and maybe he failed. But there’s only one way to try to write a story that’s better than your last  one, and that’s to write the next story.  

So he did.  

Thank you for reading it.

 

 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.

I write books. You should read them!

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The Dungeon Sender

It was just another night at the Drumless Tavern, so named because its picture (so helpful to those who did not possess  the arcane skill of reading!) didn’t have a drum on it; in fact, it featured an image of a Unicorn engaged in…in…let’s just say the  Unicorn would, in another Universe, have been earning merit badges in certain esoteric subjects, such as helping little old ladies  across the street. 

The patrons were rowdy; it was the start of the weekend, at least according to the ethos of this particular band of bargoers. (“If you drink too much to know what day it is, just assume it’s Friday evening.”) There was much dancing, boasting, and even some carousing, the latter occurring much to the dismay of the bartender, who had been hoping to get through the current fiscal year without opening a dictionary. 

Yet amidst the hubbub, the barmaids pinching the bottoms of saucy patrons (all barmaids are one-third lobster, which is  why you ought not pinch them without their consent; their grip is perfectly capable of dropping a Vulcan in under two seconds),  and the hearty sips taken of good wine (oh, surely, this was the “good” wine. You wouldn’t want to meet the “bad” wine. Let us, for just a moment, forget the condition of what was once called ‘wine’ in the first place.  Realistically, it wasn’t just terrible, it just had a fairly low alcohol content. Consider that face you make when you drink whiskey.  Now imagine that your wine tastes worse, but also, you have to drink a lot more of it before you begin hitting on traffic lights. That’s a sad state of affairs, mitigated only slightly by the fact that traffic lights don’t currently exist)— 

And, of course, the infrequent barfights, but that’s really more romantic myth than anything else. No innkeeper wants her furniture and glassware destroyed by idiots. In those days, places which served alcohol didn’t exactly have bouncers to keep out anyone in particular; they just had a few large people on-hand, and iron-tipped truncheons below the bar. These were precautions against the offchance that anyone engaged in the very healthy sport of replacing one’s rather thin and sickly blood with good, strong, healthy might momentarily decide, rather than falling over onto the floor, to fall over onto someone else, starting a fight which might result in spilled drinks.  

But Adventurers gather here with a far more serious purpose than drinking ale: namely, drinking mead and whisk—that is to say, they gather here for the valuable practice of renewing vital energies and reviewing their recent harrowing dungeon escape.  

And, of course, to find out what the hell to do next. 

Evil takes a number of forms which are, unfortunately, as nefarious as they are multifarious. This results in certain difficulties. For example, particularly well-organized evil, such as the Dark Elven Empire, is, as one could potentially guess by  the name, an empire, which is to say, an entire civilization, consisting of, among other things, its own military forces, cities, and (in this case) multiple giant horrible arachnids. It’s quite difficult to strike a blow for freedom under such circumstances; or, to be  precise, striking a blow is not, in and of itself, impossible; it’s just that the blow itself is likely to land on armor, a shield, or some chitinous arthropodal structure, and do very little, except to bring down upon you a level of firepower incompatible with the  practice of continuing to breathe. 

It’s difficult to find appropriate missions. They like calling themselves ‘adventurers’, because it’s an ideal. It’s exciting to travel to various places, battle monsters, win, and come back covered in gold and new knowledge. On the other hand, while being roasted into oblivion by a Dragon is certainly more exciting than being a farmer, it’s not so much ‘adventurous’ as it is ‘fatal in an unusual and horrible way’. Realistically, adventurers are good at completing missions which would be impossible for those without their courage, bravery, special skills, magical items, and ability to dive out of the way of hideous danger and emerge with the same ten fingers and ten toes as when you started (Adventurers call this “rolling a natural 20”.) 

That’s why the cloaked figure is sitting in the corner, gazing deep into the heart of a glass of the very finest wine, an  extraordinary vintage which might actually have been made from grapes of some kind, although in your typical village tavern,  you really didn’t want to ask such things. Generally, you sniffed for alcohol, in the hopes that the fermenting process had killed  enough of whatever else might be in the bottle that you’d probably be able to walk away relatively unscathed.  

No-one knows where he came from, or what thoughts lie behind the penetrating eyes which were almost invisible  within his garment’s voluminous hood. (The bartender didn’t even want to think about the world ‘voluminous’.) No-one could  speak to the figure’s origin or nature, or even his age, for though his brow is lined with worries, his face is ageless—what rare  glimpses of it can be seen beneath the aforementioned cloak. One would wonder how anybody could see out of that damned  sartorial rat-trap, and if you think hat-hair is a challenge, behold those who attempt to bear the awesome and hideous weight of  hood-hair. Which is another reason why he never removes the thing in public.

(To be continued…)

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Displacer Beast

Of all the beasts which, if they’re lost, please don’t put out a tracer
Approximately the very top of my personal list is the one they call “Displacer”.
If I see one, I’ll likely ask for gin, with a bit of an arsenic chaser
Given my choice, I’d treat the whole species with one giant eraser.

Query submitted for your consideration:
Why have a creature with such a talent for teleportation?
It indicates a Universe with a terrible sense of organization.
We’ve got some awful weird Gods to make such weird miscreation.

(Some Gods are drunk, some Gods are coked
This creator-God is A.E. van Vogt.
We’re not sure just what he toked
Or what peculiar serums, poked.)

(Was it incense? Was it hash?
Overindulging in the Monster Mash?

Were his tastes a little queer?
Did he watch the unholy on his palantir?)

Whatever it was, this beast’s creator
Decided to go for ‘logic later’
Going instead, for reasons mystic,
A monster that’s utterly surrealistic.

Now I’ll admit: I read Van Vogt
Long before Gygax spoke’d*
I’ve read lots of science fiction
A victim of that weird addiction.

But I can’t seem to make this (at least)
Describe the damn Displacer Beast.
I do my best with the words I’ve got
But where I try to describe it, the Beast is not.

I think I’ll go back to writing Underdarks
Or of John Carter (Sark of Sarks)
And leave this poem slightly ill,
Triumph of no rhyming will.

Displacer beast, go! go! displace!
I’m going to put whiskey in my face.

___________

[I write things. You can find some of them on Amazon.]

* This is a terrible rhyme, and I am ashamed of myself.

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Giant Ammonnite

The Giant Sea Ammonite
Is most unbearably impolite
If it succeeds with its attacks,
It might swallow you, for grace it lacks.

The horror has poison, as well;
It looks rather like the Liberty Bell
(If it were designed by Robert Bloch;
Half Cthulhu, half tattered sock.)

Now, if found in a museum
It would cause far less stress per deum,
But when in Dungeons it’s observed
Adventurers become unnerved.

(And once again, my fervent cry:
“Why, Dungeons and Dragons? Why?
How does it share an ecology
With Dragons, Elves, and sorcery?”)

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986 Rules For People Who Have Been Driven Mad By The Necronomicon And Are Not Good At Counting To 13

13. It is a base canard that one cannot study The Necronomicon and retain some grip on sanity. It is merely a book. Were books capable of driving us mad, imagine how often one might stumble out of a library, an abandoned bookstore, the site a ruined temple whose bloody and unthinkable worship predates Sumer in something darker, stranger, and whose merest vestigial memory lends terror to the back of the minds of each and every one of us.

12. And logic dictates that we likewise promulgate and assess the opposing view. Should works of such power exist in our Universe, what makes us think that we would be capable of even assessing them, let alone drawing from them enough understanding of the Cosmos to have the mercy of being driven out of the torment of one’s own mind?

11. Besides, none of these things are true. I’ve been having the loveliest chat with Azathoth, Whose foul exigence extrudes throughout all known being and permeates all speed and time. And he says that everything is perfectly tickety-boo, so why worry?

X. Who are we to define ‘madness’? Some are thought to be mad because they are a tad gloomy, and some are thought to be mad because they have spent the past sixty years laboriously unearthing some Thing beneath the benighted and forgotten cellars of their moldering familial estate. Basically the same thing.

[this rune is technically a number but is not permitted to be drawn in spaces where human eyes might make contact with any of its outer edges, much less the sign which lies in its center.] 

7. Shoggoths make better lovers.

6. This simple and easy recipe merely requires an inchoate primordial sludge, such as that which must have formed when the Things from another place first cast Their perceptions into this tiny, pitiful little space humans inhabit; some garlic, some pepper, a little broiled Mi-Go filet, and a good dollop of butter.

V. The 9th Side of the Great Pyramid of Giza is really lovely during this part of the year, isn’t it? You get such a lovely view when the icy Moons of Leng suddenly rise behind it and pull you into space through your retinae.

[if this number had a name, or, indeed, a number, it might be four.] Euclidean Geometry is just so terribly limiting, isn’t it? Why must we be limited to going upwards when we go up, downwards when we go down, and to various points in spacetime at various points in spacetime? How arbitrary!

3. They say Arkham Asylum is particularly cheerful at this particular time in the Mayan Calendar. Asylums are a good place to be at the end of the World. In my experience, they’re quite focused on the idea that your problems can’t be  primarily real, and must be within your own mind. This is normally distressing, but it’s extremely comforting as Reality begins patiently unraveling itself.

2. Honestly, the Necronomicon is a bit dry at points. But I probably shouldn’t have doodled in the margins.

Those weren’t margins.

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[I write things. You can find some of them on Amazon.]

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