Category: Exceeding strange

Hymn to Cthulhu

Without its corruption, nothing can rot and be remade.

It is the wisdom of stars and the patience of aeons.

It is the power to return and master us at any time.

Before it science means nothing,

reason is a faithless servant,

and devouring disregard is our puniest allotment of punishment

as time slows to absorb the madness.

None dare approach it in its indifference,

let alone its wrath.

Before it gods go mad and flee;

none but we fear-raddled mites

upon its immense and glistening form

may approach the abyssal boredom of its majesty.

Releasing my inner zombie /coffee

Wow, I guess I always subconsciously knew this.

Do you know what I’d do if I was at home, and there was an earthquake, and my house didn’t collapse or catch fire?

After I ensured that the cats and my brother were safe, I’d send Jeff on a mission to get another propane canister or two, and I’d make coffee.  I’d light the barbecue burner on the back deck and boil water to make coffee with.  Coffee is hot.  Coffee wakes you up. And coffee is what you are going to want when you’ve been pulling people out of buildings all morning.

The global system of commerce may collapse (I personally have my doubts that it will do anything but restructure itself after years of privation, just like the last time) but as long as people want sugar and coffee and there’s a boat that can carry them, I’m not too worried about the future of my relationship with coffee.

I mentioned coffee is hot.  A study on social isolation – it’s in the last couple of days on eurekalert.org – says that social isolation makes people literally feel cold.  That’s why hot food is an integral part of social connectedness and discourse in this and any other culture, whether it’s a tropical country or not.

After I made coffee I’d deliver it to people who needed it.  Then I’d go back to the barbecue and make an immense pot of oatmeal.  Then I’d start taking stuff out of the freezer and cooking it so it didn’t go bad.  That’s what I’d do – I’d stay close to my technologically sophisticated hearth.

Am I most of the way through a full bore meltdown?

Check.  I’m being very relaxed and restrained about my mental meltdown, but I just lost my cell phone, and that’s about as crazy as I like to get.  Losing things is what agitated, preoccupied and outright loony people do; I misplace things relatively frequently but outright lose them, no.

I find it entertaining to review what I’ve lost in my life, like the watch my grandparents had given me LESS THAN 24 HOURS PREVIOUSLY …. I took if off in a restroom in the Dorval Airport to wash my hands, back when I was, like, ten years old and left it there.  Oh, I shed many a bitter tear over that loss, I’ll tell ya.  I lost the first guitar I was given when I foolishly gave it to Daxus.  I guess I wasn’t expecting him to smash it.  I’m still kinda irritated with him about that; it’s like there’s no percentage in forgiving him if it turns me into a sap the next time. I guess it’s a XXXXsight harder to live my Unitarian Universalist principles than I thought.

Did you know that Unitarianism was almost a STATE RELIGION in part of Europe?  Trust Unitarians to get excited over the Edict of Turda.  Couldn’t they have named it after anything else but what sounds like Turd’s twin sister’s name?  I’m sure it means “Land of Stunning Trannies” in Hungarian or Romanian but it does, as the saying goes, sound like shit in English.  Then a Catholic came back on the throne and Unitarianism gotsked itself persemacuted.  That old timey stuffed looked ZIP like contemporary Unitarianism except that durned tolerance thing we’re so notably noted for.  North American Unitarians adopt 2nd and 3rd world Unitarian churches because they are so cute and old fashioned, and in the case of the Transylvanian churches SERVICES ARE SEGREGATED BY SEX which is just like, freaky, and I’ve only seen that in real life in a Russian Orthodox Church and an Ahmadi mosque so that’s kind of a triple whammy on the freaky for me.  I only go into these ‘other peoples” sanctuaries once in a lifetime and yet it reminds me of the old fashioned Unitarian churches in Transylvania (actually northern Romania, out Kobatfalva way). Not that I’ve ever been there, but I know people who’ve gone.  There’s video of kids driving critters down the main drag.  And the services. For me it’s all about the singing, those mournful Hungarian tunes.  I much prefer the livelier contemporary hymns for myself on an ongoing basis, especially anything which sounds like the attenuated and timid version of Gospel singing as performed by U*Us.

Google, entertainingly, knows where Kobatfalva is on the map, but is unable to provide enough of a close up to demonstrate there’s even a cowpath where the arrow is pointing, and it and the surrounding countryside is made up of rocky vertiginous hills split by rivers which in spring can swell in no time to floods that come right through town. You have to live in the valley bottom cause it’s the only place you have a fond hope of growing food and raising most critters.

Of course, to loop elliptically back to my opening comments; of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.

Special thanks to Jeff for dinner, it was yummy.

Friday Roundup

Watched the opening sequence of Quake IV – not bad, but derivative, like everything else in the universe, including my own DNA f’chrissakes.

I CAN’T get Young Dumb and Crazy out of my head, I was singing it all day, mixed in with the Blasteeze the Laxative Coughdrops Song. “There will be a brief hi-a-tus, then, the mentholated flatus; pop these babies in your mouth, and soon your drawers are headed south.” Yeah, I sang that every time I went by HR today.  Kind of without really realizing what I was doing.  HR is next to the washroom, after all.

I light a candle for Tanya and her hubby – a swift recovery and sweet sweet sleep for both of them, please thanks kbai.

I light a candle for Patricia, and she knows why.

I light a candle for Gianna, who has one of the most infectious laughs I have ever heard.

I light a candle for Robof9, and he knows why.

I light a blowtorch of a candle for Paul, and he knows why.

I light a candle for the start of another church year and the success of the fall gathering.  (It’s a church thingy, the regional fall gathering.)

I won’t be going to church on Sunday as ScaryClown is going to try to set a new record for margaritas before lunch and I’m damned if I’ll miss that. Three margaritas would have me running my hand over the waiter’s ass, and it had absolutely no effect that one could detect on ScaryClown.  Jeff and Keith will also be in attendance. I’ll take the camera this time as I love the decor in the restaurant.

The cats are fine.  Eddie’s taken off a little weight and his digestion seems to be a bit better. Gizmo curled up in Jeff’s lap last night and looked up at him adoringly and then farted continuously for about twenty minutes, he was that relaxed.

No word from Katie; I imagine she’ll turn up eventually but she missed getting Switzerland Chicken ordered for her. Please note that she is learning how to play chess; I am sure her uncle will be cheerfully amused and pleased by this intelligence.

Work sux, but in a good way.  You know, the birthing pangs way.

I saw a rainbow this morning.

More NCIS turned up.  That makes me very, very happy.

And tomorrow, the intelligent & beautiful Shannon and the magnificent & useful Jerome will, in front of their friends and family, pledge their intention to spend the rest of their days together.  They got no worse odds than anybody else, in fact I’d say better, and dayum, they will make pretty children.  Me happy.  And I’ll get to see Mike dressed up, which pleases me, and I don’t have to do any grzsly shopping, they want money.

Check Snopes.com for the Palin letter. Innnteresting.

It feels so good to be home and sitting with the folks.  Life’s good.

O to have believed and seen the mighty Hypnotoad!

With my own eyes, my good family, with my own eyes I have seen the glory of Hypnotoad.  I don’t know if Hypnotoad is a boy or a girl; the bio is sketchy.  See I always want to know, when I run into a deity for the first time, if it’s a boy or a girl, because you bet your nougat-sweet butt, that makes a difference when it comes to propitiating time.  Just as it does in daily life, let alone wrasslin’ with deities.

Hypnotoad is a 30 minute cartoon by the demented minds of the makers of Futurama.  It made it onto the DVD of Bender’s Big Score (which is a magnificent film BTW, IMHO & YMMV).  It is about 25 minutes of a cartoon toad with woobly eyes sitting immobile on a white background.  (Interspersed with bizarre other stuff).  The audio consists of a mesmerizing, throbbing, metallic, mechanical, droning sound, or a laugh track which, you would think, would be pointless when little or nothing is changing (interspersed with weird other stuff).  Somehow, they take the notion of a laugh track, pop a sack over its head and give it a couple of quick kicks in the ass.

Perhaps I was giddy from Jeff having completed my taxes (of course they owe me money) and easily amused. I did get restless after a while, but it was still worth seeing.  Hey Jeff!  We should do a Best of Hypnotoad, and edit it down for everything that ‘happens’ and just leave two seconds of standard Hypnotoad.  And before we do that, we should check the Internet to see if somebody’s done it already.

My word, I can’t stop thinking about Hypnotoad.  The woobly eyes are perfectly spherical, with pea green soup “whites” and with irises like gasping mouths or puckering ani.  They gasp at you and then will abruptly be replaced by advertisements for repellent products, blipverts and subliminals about the repellent products, and advertisements for DVDs of 365 episodes of what you just watched, which was almost all Hypnotoad, all the time. It becomes gently and relentlessly recursive.  It is genius, it is madness, it is …. Hypnotoad.

Towards the beginning end of the 30 minutes, Jeff said, “He’s very self-confident, Hypnotoad.”

I took the Steampunk Personality Test bwa ha ha

You are Arcanist-Major Edmund Ras of the Praxian Alliance, assigned as liaison to the Legion of Peace.  You are a scholar, a scientist, and a sorcerer, in a city that distrusts the first two and despises the third.  Though you are kind-hearted and concerned about the betterment of others, the hostility you routinely encounter has left you jaded and sardonic.  You have a sharp tongue and a very dark sense of humor, and you delight in mocking those with irrational fears and prejudices.  Your outlook on life teeters between the optimistic and the resigned, and you still can’t decide if humanity is worth the trouble.  Still, even if humanity is doomed to self-destruction you are willing to risk your life to give it just one more generation.

Star Wars floppy & other news

I don’t know why I thought this was so funny, but I did.

Chipper got her dvd of puppy power but has not reported back yet. I’m bouncing from one foot to the other wanting to know.

Paul’s back from the Adirondacks. Tish and Terry are doing fine. Paul says he had a really tough time keeping up with Terry, but he’s been saying that for 25 years so I don’t think this represents a change. Terry always seemed to be a secret new power source anyway. And sing yip and whoo hoo! Paul quit smoking! Seven days no smokes, let’s all think positive.

No word from Katie, but I imagine somebody would have called me if any further insanity had taken place that I really had to know about.

I just made french toast. How amazing! Jeff has just gotten up! Good, otherwise I might end up eating it. Time to put on the bacon. Jeff doesn’t drink coffee anymore, but he misses it. I say things like “I can’t live without coffee” but of course I can. I’d be learning how to roast chicory as a substitute.