Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

Father’s Day 2026

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So, I got every father’s Father’s Day dream come true.  I didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything at all today!  I slept an hour late and I ate a leisurely breakfast and I went outside to breath in the Summer Solstice air and stare at the sky and enjoy the experience of time standing still at the top of the solar roller coaster ride before it comes crashing down in the Winter Solstice and Christmas.  And it occurred to me that I would only be getting a handful more of these.  How many exactly, was a secret that the big guy upstairs plays relatively close to the vest but a dozen or two is an optimistic range.  From the point of view of probabilities even zero more summers isn’t that very unlikely.  So, I decided I should treat this occasion with the proper respect and commune with the spirit of the day.

So, I saw something I’d never seen before.  Two rabbits were standing outside of the living room window and almost nose to nose facing each other.  And suddenly one of them jumped vertically in the air and landed in the same exact spot.  And a few moments later it did the exact same thing.  I was very curious about this ritual.  Was it a male and female in some strange mating dance or was it two males trying to decide who was the bull goose rabbit of the area.  But I never found out because just then they must have seen me moving behind the window and took off (like rabbits).  I thought it was interesting how an animal with such a lopsided set of limbs could manage to launch itself so precisely square.  Its entire back remained parallel with the ground throughout its rise and fall.  Or at least that is how it appeared to me.  Well, you live and you learn.

Today the neighbors began delving into their Fourth of July stash of high explosives.  For the most part it seemed to be some kind of a series of about ten detonations in a row that seemed larger than fire crackers but smaller than M-80s.If I were going to guess I’d say it was some kind of a small mat of interconnected charges that branch off from a common fuse.  And this moderate sized munition doesn’t have a bad effect on the dogs so far.  They haven’t gotten worked up or frightened or even seemed to notice them so far.  But that is a temporary situation.  My neighborhood is sort of the Yucca Flats of fireworks testing.  One of the close neighbors (although because of vegetation cover I’ve never been able to determine exactly which one) must have access to fairly large thermonuclear devices.  The seismic events are somewhere around eight on the Richter Scale.  The fact that the recoil of the ground has shifted the orientation of my house by forty degrees over the course of the last few years is a testament to the quality of his firework merchant.  But Dunwich doesn’t have a noise ordinance or an atmospheric test ban.  So, I expect the show will be spirited this year.  Let the games begin!

To the Marriage of True Minds

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So, I was at one of those parties today and I met a bunch of nice folks and spent time with some old friends too.  And one of my friends was telling a story about a relative of his who had a job that involved a lot of international travel including Europe where he met his future wife.  And because of his desire to build up some equity in a home he bought a house in a town where he did not necessarily want to eventually settle down when he returned permanently to the US.

So, when he and his new wife took up residence in this home, he had his eyes open for his dream house which would include a huge garage that would accommodate his hobby of rebuilding classic old cars.  And one day he found it.  It had everything he wanted and was in the part of town he liked best.  So, he informed his wife of his find and that they should get ready to sell their house and move to the new location.  What he didn’t realize was that since moving back his wife had put down roots in the neighborhood and made friends and after moving to a new continent she would be devastated if she had to pull up roots again and start from scratch.

So, he stayed and had to forego the dream garage.  And my friend finished by saying that he had always been extremely shocked that his relative hadn’t insisted that they move in order to get the garage he really wanted.  So, I said to him, “But aren’t they still happily married?”  And he said “Yeah.”  “Well,” I said, “what’s harder to find, a good wife or a good garage?  And what are the chances of finding a second wife as good as the first?”  He chuckled and said, “I see your point.”

Now mostly this is just an amusing story.  The whole reason that his relative didn’t demand a move is that in any halfway decent marriage there is always a whole continuum of tradeoffs and negotiations that go on between a husband and wife.  We all have our “garage” that we want badly and also a laundry list of things that come ahead of it in the calculus of family life.  The kids’ braces come before that man cave you lust after.  A minivan has to be financed before the fishing boat you’ve always wanted.  Sometimes by the time it’s your turn to buy your heart’s desire, your heart no longer desires it.  Or you’re too old to put it to good use.

But managing to raise a family in today’s society and still being married to someone you like at the end is something of an accomplishment and I guess that was what I was trying to say.  It’s a trite saying, “Happy wife, happy life.”  But if you’ve had a happy marriage, it rings true.  Now before I get too sappy, I’ll append the classic answer that Art (Deputy Marshal in “Justified”) gave to the criminal when asked if he loved his wife, “Well, most of the time!”  But even that limitation admits to the fact that (mostly) happily married men recognize that even if a marriage is fraught with feminine annoyances the alternative is much sadder and lonelier.

Parties and Stories

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Tomorrow Camera Girl and I are double booked for parties.  We have a graduation party and a friend’s family party.  And they’re both at about the same time.  So, I suggested that we go to the graduation party for an hour or so and then head to the second one.  Camera Girl spent a couple of days telling me why that was a stupid idea.  And then she told me that we would split up and each go to only one party.

So, then I suggested we start off going to separate parties but then I would come back and pick her up and both of us would go to the friend’s party.  I think she wanted to hit me.  She shook her head and walked away.  I don’t think she understands optimization.

You see if I show up at a party by myself everyone is going to want to know where she is and why I showed up without her.  I’m not the draw.  She’s much more interesting because she’s telling stories about all the stupid things I do.  And when she tells them they’re funny.  Now I can’t tell stories about myself.  It would sound stupid.  I need a straight man to tell the story and then let me weave my defense.  It would be like Costello asking “who’s on first” without Abbott.  It’s just not the same without the cross-talking.

So today I checked my stats on Amazon.  So far, “The Sniper” has sold a total of 303 books (65 paperback copies and 238 e-books) and 3,657 pages on Kindle Unlimited.  On Kindle Unlimited my book is about 210 pages long so 3,657 pages is about 17 copies.  Not bad for about a month on Kindle Unlimited.  But I may have to cancel the yacht.

But the lack of fabulous wealth from my book sales has not dampened my enthusiasm for writing.  In fact, I’ve become much more excited about the sequel.  And what has me most intrigued is not so much the plot or even the new and old characters.  What I’m interested in is injecting more dialog.  Specifically, I want to get some of the characters to tell their stories.  And I know that this is backward.  The author is supposed to show the reader the story and not tell it. But storytelling within a story is an interesting technique that I’d like to try.  And I’d like to introduce dialog between characters about politics, economic policy, religion, traditional family, artificial intelligence, the war between the sexes, energy policy, the future of the human race, space exploration and a million other things.

Of course, I’ll have to be careful I don’t drown out the action under such a heavy soaking of blather but I think it’s time for my world to start exhibiting brains and not just marksmanship.  One thing I haven’t worked out yet is whether I get Connors and Grace to go out on a date.  I’ve been bouncing some stuff off of Camera Girl but I still don’t know whether any of it makes sense.  Oh well, the only way to find out is to start writing and see where it goes.

Pond Life

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A beautiful early summer day with low humidity, temperatures in the high seventies, plenty of sun and a light breeze; actually paradisical.  Camera Girl is watching over the pond I built for her and has filled it with various water plants, gold fish, minnows, frogs and snakes from the surrounding environs and the various “pond supply stores” that traffic in such things.  For a while she was very uneasy because she had not seen any of the fish for a whole week and assumed that the local raccoons had fished them out overnight.  But the real reason she couldn’t see them was because they were hiding in the murky depths of the pond.  And they were doing that because they’re stupid fish.  But once she started feeding them at a regular hour, they would arrive en masse to gorge on the putrid pellets that the pet store assured us was nectar and ambrosia for these same piscine recluses.

But interestingly the frogs really are AWOL.  I attribute this to the warmer weather we’ve had for the last week or two.  My pond must be several degrees warmer than the water in the swamp and they probably enjoy that temperature at this time of year.  But I’m sure they’ll come and go once they start finding insects and other invertebrates taking up residence in the new watering hole.

SONY DSC

As for the snakes, I found an immature northern water snake and an immature Eastern garter snake around the yard and chucked them in the water last week.  The water snake stuck around for a couple of days but the garter left after an hour or so.  They’ll also come and go as prey species appear.  I’m hoping the water snake population discovers this pond and makes it a permanent part of their range because they can prey on the gold fish and keep the numbers stable.  Plus, they’re fun to see around a pond.  They’re nasty creatures to handle.  They love to bite anyone careless enough to leave flesh within range of their jaws and they also defecate on anyone holding them.  And since fish is the main part of their diet this fluid is extremely offensive smelling.  So, they’re much better as wild inhabitants of the pond than as pets.

The turkeys wandered through the yard again last week and stopped by the pond for a drink.  Although I couldn’t imagine drinking that water.  Then again, I couldn’t imagine drinking the water in the swamp but all of the wildlife in this area; bears, coyotes, foxes, otters, weasels, beavers, raccoons, opossums and birds of all kinds drink nothing else and seem to survive unscathed.  But despite this I still feel they’d easily learn to prefer cold seltzer as I do.  But I guess it takes all kinds.

Currently the only critter I haven’t managed to find and fling in the puddle is the Eastern red-spotted newt.  I usually see this around the yard but none have come my way since I built the pond so it’ll have to wait until chance accommodates my plan.  Of course, the goldfish may not play nice with the newts when the former start achieving size.  I could see the little fellows getting inhaled by these fancy carp.  But as Camera Girl always says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”  But what about Hannibal Lecter?

Robert’s Rules of Order, Optional

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So we’re in the thick of this mid-term election cycle here in Dunwich.  And just as all over the country election holders that have strayed from what their party wants are being primaried out of their candidacies, so there have been several candidates who showed up at the Town Hall to take out papers to run against the First Selectmen.

Now this isn’t unprecedented.  Every few years someone moves into town and after experiencing just how “difficult” conditions are in town government, decides to throw his hat in the ring.  Now usually after seeing that First Selectman Cthulhu’s hat is thirty feet in diameter the incipient “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” type picks up his hat out of the ring and slinks back home.  But this year’s Mr. Smith (specifically a fellow named Ned Parson) was made of sterner stuff.  He paid his registration fee and showed up in front of Town Hall and challenged the First Selectman to a debate.

Cthulhu nodded his head and told his secretary to set up a public meeting on Sentinel Hill on the following Monday.  Sentinel Hill is convenient for meetings involving the First Selectman because if the humans are standing on the top of the hill and Cthulhu stands at the base, his head is only slightly above their level.  Also the acoustics are such that Cthulhu can usually hear mostly everything spoken by the humans.  And this is important.  Because if he can’t hear what’s being said, he tends to think he’s being disrespected and that usually ends poorly.

Last Monday it was cold and cloudy but there was a decent crowd, maybe fifty townspeople milling around the podium at the top of the hill.  And on the podium Ned Parson was dressed as Uncle Sam including the beard.  He was throwing buttons to the crowd that said “Be Led by Ned!!!” along with shooting off some confetti poppers.  He seemed confident, almost jubilant.  As the noon hour approached the First Selectman rumbled up to his station on the valley floor.  His facial expression was as usual unreadable but his breathing seemed to be a little noisier than usual.  There might also have been a certain grinding of his teeth audible but not very loudly.

At noon the Town Clerk climbed the podium and read the description of the event; “Debate for First Selectman Office.”  She added that Ned Parson had one the coin toss and would speak first.  Ned proceeded, “My fellow Dunwichians, I stand before you today prepared to finally convert this town from a weird dysfunctional outpost into a modern, progressive New England town.  For too long you’ve all suffered under the inefficient, corrupt and depressing administration of my opponent.  For too long you’ve been unable to get town services or even the comfort of knowing a constabulary stood ready during outbreaks of vampirism or lycanthropy to protect life and property.  I have the support of the local surrounding towns and I will bring our standards up to those of our neighbors.  I will not stand still.  I will move forward and I will make a big splash in this little place.”

The Town Clerk thanked Ned and then asked the First Selectman for his rebuttal.  Cthulhu reached down to the podium and closed his hand around Ned, winding up he threw a perfect strike.  Ned splatted against the rock face of Mt Bishop leaving a sizable red stain.  Cthulhu guffawed, “That little man was right, he made a big splash.”

Well, as debates go, it was to the point.

Recreational Time Travel

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So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.  Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger days are among the happiest moments you spend.  Now don’t get me wrong, things happening in the present day can be fun and exciting and interesting for sure.  But more and more, you become a stranger in the strange land that is the present day.  You look around and you see that everything has changed; the culture, the people, the places, the language, the entertainment and especially the technology.  Even the things that are supposed to be things from your time have been changed until you’re not even qualified to use them.  As an example, look at the telephone.  If you had handed a smart phone to a person in 1970, they would have no idea what it was but they would definitely deny it was a telephone.

So, we are experiencing the slow eradication of the world we knew.  And if you came from a place that has been remade over the last half century it’s even more disconcerting.  Your past has been basically erased and what’s left sometimes has nothing at all left that resembles the place you grew up in.

So, this is all true.  And getting angry or depressed about it won’t change anything except make you feel worse.  But recently I realized that nostalgia is a form of time travel.  You get to use your memories and some touchstones (like people, movies, photos and music) and travel back to a magic place where you were a kid or a newlywed or a happy parent but definitely in the older world where everything was familiar and you were at the center of the universe.

So, you might be watching an old movie and suddenly a bus is moving down a street and it triggers memories when you were living there and were on an identical bus and you think of a day when you took a bus ride that was involved in an important event in your life.  Or you hear a song that you remember hearing when you were on the beach with your best girl.  Or you go to a classic car show and see a car that you owned or was owned by a friend.  And the memories come flooding back and you’re walking around in 1969 or 1987.  And your older relatives are still alive and none of your friends have moved far away and everybody you care about is a short ride away.

Sure, it’s a bit of an escape.  And it doesn’t solve any of the problems you have in the here and now.  The country is still overrun with illegal aliens and gasoline is almost $5 a gallon and your bones are really creaky but for a few minutes or an hour you’re living in the happiest place on Earth; your youth.  Now, you can’t over do it.  If you spend all day every day in the past, you’ll lose the ability to cope with the present.  And you won’t be any use to people who think of now as the center of the universe.  So, I plan to use it sparingly and save it for special occasions where I can share it with the other survivors from the golden age.  Just something I thought of.

A Good Day to be a Writer

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Today I went to my tax accountant to discuss my “royalties.”  I waited until now because tax season is much too hectic to talk about 2026 issues to people in that profession.  I have had a few unhappy incidents with the tax man and I go way out of my way to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Now this is my new accountant.  In fact, he’s the grandson of my old accountant.  His grandfather is retiring soon so I’m sort of an inheritance.  When I arrived, I saw a kid walking in the front door and after waiting in the waiting room for a few minutes that same kid turned out to be my accountant.  But despite his youthful appearance he proved up to the job of assuaging my fears about ending up in an IRS gulag for high crimes and misdemeanors against the tax code.  Specifically, I was worried that maybe there was some kind of monthly reporting and payment I needed to perform for both the state and federal systems.  I remember when I was dealing with a state agency that required businesses to collect and pay sales tax monthly.

He explained to me that unless I was profiting to the tune of several thousand dollars a month, I wouldn’t need to send any money to the feds but even if I did, I’d be getting it back if I had enough “expenses” (like Amazon Ads and marketing fees) to cover the royalties I received.

At the mention of expenses, I barked a bitter laugh.  I told him the idea that I was profiting from my sales was laughable in the extreme.  Basically, a first book (barring some miraculous viral publicity) was a loss leader for the rest of the sequels.  He agreed that his other author clients had told him about what it took to grow a book business but he also warned me that the feds only give you three years to turn a profit before they stop considering it a business and declare it a hobby for which expenses are not credited.  Well, we’ll have to see about that.

So, we agreed I’d check back with him in June to see if I was any closer to needing to send some cash to the feds.  And he didn’t want to take a fee for his services today but I insisted.  The information I got had so eased my mind that I felt I would be robbing him of a well-earned reward if I didn’t give him fifty bucks.  I mean people who go to therapy to ease their minds pay their psychiatrists many hundreds of dollars and get less peace of mind than I did today.  I would have felt like a thief if I walked out for nothing.

And looking at my book’s Amazon page, I had two new very complimentary reviews.  One was from a friend of mine.  He disclosed our relationship but it was still a very good review.  And another one was from someone who was an Iraq War vet who enjoyed the scenes in the desert.  That kind of made my day.  So today is a good day to be a writer.

Of Pyramids and Pitchforks

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Like the Pharaoh Cheops I know the pain and exultation inherent in an enormous engineering project.  Yes, he built the Great Pyramid of Giza.  But I built the Great Pond of Camera Girl.  So, let’s just look at the stats:

 

Project Name Great Pyramid of Giza Great Pond of Camera Girl
Length of project 27 years (total) 27 hours (active time)
Scope 2.6 million 2.5-ton blocks 270 gallons of dirt
Volume of project 92 million cubic feet 36 cubic feet
Size of Crew 40,000 1
Total manhours 1,752,000,000 27
Significance of project Final resting place of pharaoh Husband making wife happy
Projected lifetime of structure millennia until roots from cherry tree puncture liner
Tools copper tools, ropes, levers, sledges shovel, pitchfork, rake, wrecking bar, wheelbarrow, 4″ level (plastic), good old American grit and determination

 

Based on scope I guess I’ll have to hand it to Cheops.  27 years is a pretty good effort.  Of course, if we count the fact that I’ve been throwing out the garbage and repairing stuff around the house for almost 50 years all of a sudden Cheops is coming up kind of short.  Isn’t he!

But I don’t want to overreach.  People have been travelling to Egypt for millennia to gawk at the pyramids and so far, Camera Girl is the only one who has praised my great engineering project.  And even though she has been quite generous with the superlatives I must admit that 92 million cubic feet of limestone blocks isn’t anything to sneeze at.  I mean I dropped one of the rocks I dug out on my foot and that damn thing hurt but a five-thousand-pound rock is a little bit more of a big deal if it ends up on your foot.  So, okay.  Cheops wins.  He’s big man on campus.

But let’s look at this from a different perspective.  What did Mrs. Cheops have to say about the whole thing?  Based on my research after watching “Land of the Pharaohs (1955)” she must have been buried alive with Cheops.

Now maybe she was down with this.  Who knows?  But my knowledge of Camera Girl leads me to believe that this would not be to her liking.  Now as a charter member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club you might think I would be an advocate for this kind of wife entombing.  But you’d be wrong.  By any objective measure she is very high in the ranks of women and hardly ever uses her feminine wiles and never takes advantage of the modern anti-male legal or social mechanisms to make my life miserable.  By my reckoning she is a good egg and fully worthy of this amazing civil engineering marvel.

Next, we’ll fill it with water and put in a bunch of water lilies and other plants and then buy some goldfish and sit around in the afternoon and watch these aquatic vertebrates do their thing.  And then one day the local Great Blue Heron will discover this little water hole and eat all of the fish in one meal.  But as Camera Girl always says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”

Movies, Taxes and World-Building

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Well, what’s to say today?  I was talking to some family and we were discussing this and that and I said that I wanted to see “Project Hail Mary.”  And some knew about it and some had heard a little bit.  Well, I think I talked them into getting together and going to see it.  Now I plan to see it this week with Camera Girl.  She’s not the biggest sff fan by any stretch of the imagination.  When I brough her to see the original Star Wars film she was not particularly impressed.  And come to think of it, she’s never been impressed by any sci fi or fantasy movie (or book) I ever gave her.  Well, I take that back.  She read “The Hobbit” back in 1975 and liked it.  But that was it.  When I told her to read the “Lord of the Rings,” she laughed in my face.  So, she may not be the most willing audience for this movie.  But since one of the characters is a puppet I’m guessing there may be an appeal there to her love of animals.  So, I’m going to see the same movie in the theater twice?  I think this may be the first time I’ve ever done that.  Well, I’m sure it won’t kill me.

The other thing I’m doing next week is go see an accountant about how to pay my taxes on the royalties from my book.  I have an inordinate fear of the Infernal Revenue Service.  I think they’re a malevolent force causing pain and suffering for ordinary people at every turn.  So, I’m going to find out what the process is for this kind of capital gain.  I don’t think I have to pay quarterly but you never know so I’m not taking any chances.  Also, I think there is a way to write off expenses like advertising and marketing so if I can find out whether it’s worth it I may even break even on this whole experiment (maybe!!!).

A friend was asking me about the sequel to the “The Sniper.”  He had particular questions about the back story for some of the characters like Connors and Cutter.  I said I’d love to tell him some of the details of their back stories but I still haven’t made them up yet.  I think he was a little shocked that these important facts didn’t actually exist yet.  Maybe even betrayed for investing in a story that was sort of a Potemkin Village.  But I feel justified in pushing out the corners of my little universe as the spirit moves me.  Although I will admit I’ve decided to do some outlining of the world, at least from a 35,000-foot height.  I need to decide what stories will grow out of the eucatastrophe I set off in the first book.  I mean, you don’t sink the White House, Capitol and Pentagon into the Earth’s crust without taking advantage of the elbow room that provides for political and social upheaval on a grand scale.

A Quaint Dunwich Custom

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In Dunwich the end of April is both an important time of the year agriculturally but also a time of great stress.  It is at this time that the great skunk cabbage harvest occurs.  Dunwich keeps ten thousand acres in skunk cabbage cultivation.  And depending on the phase of the moon sometime between the middle of April and the middle of May all of it must be harvested and processed for First Selectman Cthulhu’s Vernal Feast.  All of the cabbage is sent through an homogenizer and then mixed 1:1 with liquified cow manure and then pumped through a high-pressure hose directly into the First Selectman’s maw.  At one hundred gallons a minute this takes about six hours to transfer.

After that there is an eight-hour fermentation stage within the First Selectman’s alimentary canal after which this process produces a gaseous effluvium that exits at a very high flow rate at about a thousand standard cubic feet a second under considerable pressure.  Now this gas not only smells disgusting but it is as poisonous as phosgene so it must be mixed with air and immediately sent through a combustion nozzle.  The outlet gas still smells unbelievably bad but it is thus rendered non-lethal.

The combustion goes on for ten hours during which time the First Selectman likes to read an improving book or watch classic movies as entertainment.  It takes a crew of two hundred of the stoutest Dunwich men to complete the full process.  And it is an exhausting and psychologically scarring ordeal to say the least.  During this time most of the inhabitants of Dunwich vacate the town for about a week until the odor abates to a significant degree.

Over the years there have been attempts at Board of Selectmen Meetings to change the town bylaws to eliminate the “feast.”  Usually, the first Selectman eats whoever adds the motion to the agenda and the motion fails unanimously.  Usually this is some newcomer to town who doesn’t understand the nuance of having a Great Old One as a town official.

But there are some “advantages” to this process.  Rodents flee the town for at least two months after the ceremony and flies are so confused by the smell that they forget to eat and just weaken and die.  So, things are pretty vermin-free around town until autumn.  So, we’ve got that going for us.

There was a funny incident last year when a state environmental officer showed up and demanded that the skunk cabbage harvest be stopped because it was a native plant that was protected against commercial harvest.  He barged into the First Selectman’s office and threatened him with arrest.  Cthulhu seemed impressed with the officer’s courage and asked if he’d like to see the skunk cabbage field.  They walked over to the farm and then he planted the officer head first into the ground and applied a couple of gentle pats of his right hand to firmly smooth out his resting place.  And that was that.  Have a happy skunk cabbage feast everybody!

 

Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields