My rainy day craft box

Being on a Lovecraft kick again, I decided to acquire and read one of the books that inspired Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulu Mythos: The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. Chambers was a bohemian artist of the 1890s who one day, for reasons he never really explained, decided to stop being an artist and start writing sensational romance stories. Shortly before he did that, however, he produced The King In Yellow, a collection of loosely connected, troubling stories of the surreal. The title refers to a fictional play script of the same name that is apparently cursed, bringing madness and death into the lives of all who read it. There are allusions to an entity known only as "Hastur," a blank white mask, and an insidious image known as The Yellow Sign. These things are all the scarier for the way they are only hinted at. These stories are some seriously creepy shit. And this book is messing with my mind.

I only read a few pages of the opening short story the night I got the book. That night I dreamed of Hastur. His white mask didn't have a face. Instead it had the Yellow Sign carved into it where the face should be. It was distressing. But hey, you read horror stories, you have dreams about the monsters, right? No big deal. Later that next day a friend on Facebook posted lyrics to a song by The Dead Milkmen. Not having heard or thought of that band in years, I innocently went and looked them up to see what became of them. It turns out they recently got back together and released a new album... called The King In Yellow!

What are the odds?

So today I went back and finished reading the story. (It's called The Repairer of Reputations, in case you're interested.) Reading it I was struck by a brutal sense of deja vu when I got to a specific line:

...I put the diadem from my head and wiped my forehead, but I thought of Hastur and my own rightful ambition, and I remembered Mr. Wilde as I had last left him...

I realized I had had a dream in which I sat reading this line over and over again several years ago. But I never actually saw it until today.

WTF is going on?



Oh. That...

Our battle with obesity goes back a long time, apparently because paintings of the Last Supper show a lot of food.

I have to agree with the Duke University psychologist who observes that this is "not meaningful science."

I now own a book that doesn't exist.

My father works for a rental car agency and occasionally he comes across interesting items left in the cars upon return. When nobody shows up to claim them he brings them to me. Yesterday he gave me what appears to be a science fiction novel titled Kimoreah by one Alan Markson. The cover is completely black with no illustrations. There is no publisher logo and no bar code. This might make it self-published except there appears to be no place online where you can go to purchase this book. There is no mention of it anywhere. Searching for the title and author only brings up a Xanga site that has not been updated in two years. And did I mention that the book is shrink wrapped in plastic? All this leads me to think that this was not intended to fall into strangers' hands.

I left a comment on the Xanga site but that's really all I can do at this point. I could care less about reading this particular book but I'd really like to solve the mystery that surrounds it.

Apparently while I was at work last night the apartment above us (the one that usually makes so much noise,) got visited by three police cars and a police van. Or perhaps, I should say by the officers in the cars and the van. The vehicles themselves stayed in the parking lot. We have no idea what was going on, but I can speculate. You don't get four vehicles to one apartment for your standard domestic. It just makes me think back to the strange days back in my old apartment in Independence when there would routinely be 3-4 police cars at the complex every single night dragging someone away. Let's hope last night was just a fluke and not the shape of things to come.

Also, when a kitten is trying to get away from you DO NOT grab it about the midsection. It WILL fart.