Category: Life in Dunwich

My Adventures in the Mythical New England Town of Dunwich

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

A Man, a Plan, Camera Girl’s Pond Project

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The things a man will do for his wife!  This is going to be a very long week.  Monday and Tuesday will be completely consumed in the service of Dunwich.  By late Tuesday night I will be moaning and groaning and repeating that law of nature “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”  And in Dunwich the punishment is always cruel and extremely unusual.

Be that as it may I had promised Camera Girl that I would build her a goldfish pond and so I have been working at it since it arrived off the third-party delivery truck that Home Depot contracted for the job.  Between Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I got to work with pitch fork, shovel, wrecking bar, rake and wheelbarrow.    I measured off the perimeter, removed the turf and started to dig.  And because this is New England (at least the parts of Dunwich which are tethered to our space-time) the ratio of rock to soil is something like 3/1.  This makes the whole procedure slow and exceedingly painful.  The good news was that the temperature was in the fifties and sixties which made the earth moving tolerable but it was still strenuous enough to prove to me that digging ditches is strictly for prison chain gangs and other equally motivated people.  It brought to mind those scenes in Cool Hand Luke.  When Camera Girl brought me out some refreshments I said in a southern accent, “Taking it off, boss!”  I don’t think she got the reference.

But finally, yesterday as the sun was getting low in the western sky, it looked like the whole hole was deep enough.  So, I lowered the liner into the hole and voila!  In fact, it’s slightly too deep and also it will need a slight adjustment to make it perfectly level.  But the fine tuning will have to wait until Wednesday.  After that I’ll start the back filling that’s needed under the parts of the liner that are raised into steps for the placement of water plants and any goofy ornaments that women feel are needed to amuse the fish and frogs.  That will probably take a day or two.  And then we’ll fill the thing up and buy some water lilies and those other little sea-weedy plants that pond supply stores hand out and then onto the fish store to get goldfish or carp or whatever hardy species are available.  Camera Girl doesn’t want koi which is probably a good idea since they’re expensive and the Great Blue Herons around here like those better.

Truth be told I’m interested in seeing if in addition to the numerous and varied frog and toad species around the yard we manage to attract other cold-blooded critters.  Since I’ve seen them in the yard, I’m guessing garter and water snakes will show up.  And the painted turtles don’t have far to go from the real pond.  But what I’m not sure about is whether any salamanders will migrate over to this new water habitat.  There are several species in the area and I’ve always wanted to attract them to the yard.

Before we moved to Dunwich, I had built a smaller pond for Camera Girl in the yard where we lived.  It always made her happy to sit and watch the various wild animals and insects that gather around water.  I’ll have this up and running before summer and she’ll be able to enjoy it the way she used to.  Ah, the things we do for love.

Wheelbarrows and Ogres

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We had Princess Sack of Potatoes over today.  She’s finishing off her Spring vacation from school.  And we haven’t had much of her time in a while.  Sure, she was here for Easter but her cousins were also here so I didn’t get much chance to spend time.  But today we had fun.  I’m installing a 270-gallon pond liner for Camera Girl, so I’m digging a big hole in the ground and working with a shovel, rake, pitch fork and a wheelbarrow so it’s like incredibly exciting for a little kid.  She wants to help and I have to find something that isn’t dangerous or too hard for a little girl but seems useful to her.  So, I told her to rescue earthworms from the pile of grass turf that I stacked up.  Perfect!  She can get her hands covered with dirt and give Camera Girl some worms for her hideous African Clawed Frog and I’m free to move some rocks and dirt.  After about an hour she had enough and went inside to bake chocolate chip cookies with Camera Girl and I continued on until lunchtime when I finished for the day and took a shower.  So, after lunch she wanted to watch the “Minions” movie which I’ve had enough of.  So, we went our separate ways.  But after that she wanted more movie time so Camera Girl suggested “The Princess Bride.”  The little girl agreed to watch it and I decided to join her to see how she reacted to this time capsule of a movie.

And it was pretty funny how her initial reaction to the movie resembled the behavior of the “grandson” played by Fred Savage when his grandfather (Peter Falk) began narrating the story.  Both the real and fictitious grandchildren were annoyed by the story beginning with a love story introduction.  And her reaction also resembled the child character whenever it seemed that the “heroes” of the story were losing to the bad guys.  There was a sense of outrage and the desire to quit the story.  It was only with great persuasion that I convinced her to hang in there after Wesley had been killed by “the Machine.”  And so, I was immensely pleased when by the end of the movie she was very satisfied with the happily ever after ending.

And after the movie I discussed her opinions about the film and she declared that her favorite character was the “Ogre.”  I corrected her by saying that Fezzik wasn’t an ogre but a giant.  And that André the Giant who played the part was a professional wrestler.  She was very interested in how he did some of the stunts.  I explained to her that the “holocaust cloak” wasn’t real and he was never on fire.  And I said he didn’t really have to climb “The Cliffs of Insanity.”  And the reason she liked him best was because he seemed very jolly.

After that she joined her grandmother in several very competitive games of checkers and then it was time for her to go home with her mom.  After she left, I inspected several of the historical photos of the Princess festooning our refrigerator and looking at a noticeably younger me and a tiny little girl in one picture reminded me very powerfully that the clock is ticking at an alarming rate.  But it was a good day to be a grandfather.

A Milestone and a Low Point

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So today I reached the two hundred book milestone.  One hundred fifty-three e-books and forty-seven paperback copies.  Camera Girl and I celebrated with a bowl of ice cream each.  And today I also got my first one-star review.  The reader was upset because he didn’t know it was a science fiction story.  And I can understand his anger.  When I selected the categories for the book the first one, I listed was science fiction.  But Amazon rejected this as a false description and deleted this category for the book.  And so, Amazon is responsible for the single one-star review I’ve received so far.  Well, the world is a complicated place and I guess nothing human is ever free from unexpected consequences.

But, all in all, it’s been an interesting experience.  It seems Amazon has created an opportunity for anyone to create a book and it even makes it possible to try and find an audience for that book in the enormous marketplace they have created on their platform.  And to the extent that I’ve found some readers I can appreciate how this is an improvement over what there was before.  And in my particular case it changes the situation from an impossibility to a difficult one.  And by that, I mean I could never have found a publisher (other than a vanity press) that would accept my story because of the right-leaning slant of my story.  After all I pretty clearly demonize Antifa in this story and that would never get past the editors and sensitivity readers employed by the “Big Five” publishing houses (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group and Macmillan).  So, I think the present set-up is an improvement for someone like me.  But that doesn’t mean finding an audience is easy.  It’s not.  It’s tricky and slow and expensive and the skill-set has absolutely nothing to do with being a writer.

The next big milestone will be when I put it on Kindle Unlimited.  But since this requires the story to be on Amazon exclusively for three months I’m waiting until I finish putting the story up on Royal Road.  I’ve been uploading it in sections (mostly a chapter a day) and I’ve got six more chapters to go, so I want to finish that first.  I want to see what feedback I get once I’ve allowed the readers there to finish the story and evaluate it.  After that I’ll take the story down from BookFunnel and Royal Road and see what happens with Kindle Unlimited.  KU lowers the cost to start the book to essentially zero and I’m hoping that will allow a larger cross-section of the general reading population to give the book a try.

And I believe this population of readers will be significantly younger than the one I’ve been reaching up till now.  Now maybe this isn’t my target audience but I think it’s important to test that hypothesis.  If Kindle Unlimited doesn’t move the needle, then I know what I’ve seen so far is a good indication of what I should expect.  So, let’s see what happens.

The Dispossessed – Part 1

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People like me are relics of a bygone era.  What we believed in and how we lived don’t exist in the present day.  We are a shadow presence in a new world made up of people who believe in and exist in a different reality from what we had.

Now we can be angry about that but that does not change the facts on the ground.  The new world has taken hold and will have to play out over the next generation before any meaningful reaction to the status quo takes hold.  The only question is what we will do.  Some folks have just given up and withdrawn into their memories and mark time until their time is up.  Other people rage against the reality on the ground and make a bunch of noise.  Well, those are both understandable reactions.  The present situation is depressing and pathetic.

What I’ve been puzzling about for the last ten years or so is how to exist in this regime but still do the things I like and live the way I want.  And that is not a simple exercise.  I can’t claim to have cracked the code and found the golden way that bypasses the toxic problems that surround us, especially folks like myself who live basically in the belly of the blue state beast.  Now granted it’s not quite as bad as California where the insanity is reaching 1984-like repression but it’s bad enough.

As best I can guess the correct path is to form a network of people like myself and do everything humanly possible to avoid the crazies both in my internal and external lives.  Other than some family who qualify as the Left I avoid any personal relationships with the insane.  Some people enjoy baiting these people and arguing about their crazy ideas.  I get exactly zero pleasure from such activities.  My idea of fun is talking and interacting with non-crazy people.

As far as the outside world, that’s a lot more difficult.  Professionally and publicly, I am surrounded by some of the craziest leftists you could hope to imagine.  This is extremely trying.  Some of these people are looking to push their world view on anyone whom they bump into.  My general rule is silence.  I don’t agree or disagree with their statements.  I maintain an impassive expression and wait for them to finish their tirade.  If they make a point of asking my opinion, I just say I have nothing to say.  So, there are plenty of crazies that become agitated by that tactic but for the most part they eventually wander away sullenly.  So that sort of works for me.

But this isn’t a robust strategy.  What it lacks is a “congregating” methodology.  We are always just a small fringe at the edges of society and we never form a larger society.  Sure, on line we have friends and acquaintances but these are distant groups and they lack the opportunities for local activities that make life interesting.  That’s the part of this situation I haven’t managed to “fix.”  I used to kid about starting the “he-man woman hater’s club” and open a chapter in every town in America.  And I think that is the answer.  And the club definitely needs a women’s auxiliary to make us sandwiches that we can bring with us to the clubhouse where they’re not allowed to go.

And I kid about this but this is what we need.  Clubs for men are exactly what is missing from life for those of us who have no use for the feminist world that has taken over from the world we knew.

Book Writing and Blogging

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Writing “The Sniper” was a massive learning experience for me.  Not only does it take up a lot of time but it also makes it much harder to do other things at the same time.  And vice versa!  Working, blogging and taking care of my other responsibilities really slowed down my book writing performance drastically.  And the time has come to begin writing the sequel.

So, something is going to have to give.  My decision is to cut back on the blogging.  Believe it or not even knocking out five hundred words has been taking a couple of hours.  And when I’m doing it at ten or eleven at night the quality has been way down.  The old brain just doesn’t click like it used to at that hour.

So, what I see happening is the posts will be hit and miss.  I’ll be able to keep the photos and quotes going without much strain.  But if I find myself scrambling for a theme, I’ll let it slide until I’ve got one that makes sense.  Quality over quantity.  It makes sense.

So, my apologies for my laziness but I am a man with definite limits.

Building Ramps and Singing Spirituals

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So, where are we today?

Eric Swalwell, the Democrat congressman who was running for governor of California has dropped out of the race and resigned from Congress after allegations of date rape and sexual assault have been levelled against him by four separate women.  Ah, the Democrats the party of feminism.  Amazing how these things only happen when they want someone to drop out of a race and he refuses.  Up until now Swalwell was best known for his vehement attacks on Donald Trump and for an incident where during an interview on an MSNBC television show he farted so loudly that microphone picked it up magnificently.  Eric we hardly knew ye.  Farewell!

So, the peace talks between the Trump administration and the Iranians have broken down so Trump has said he will take over the Straits of Hormuz.  Now, how dangerous is this situation?  I can’t even imagine something not going terribly wrong.  So, Trump is going to try and break the Iranians by cutting off all their oil money by blocking the tankers heading for China.  This is a hardcore tactic.  I guess it could work.  I’m sure we’ll know pretty soon how this is going to end up.  Good luck Mr. Trump.  You will need it.

Trump is in a war of words with the Pope.  Well, this one’s easy.  I’ll back Trump.  The last couple of popes don’t seem to be infallible.  I’m not sure they were even Christians.  More like the kind of atheists they turn into bishops in some of the trendy denominations.  But I don’t think Trump should waste his time fighting with him.  It’s a waste of time.

Well, we’ve reached the warm weather here this week.  Today and tomorrow will both break the eighty-degree mark and I’ve turned off the house’s heating system for the summer.  Of course, if the weather gods go berserk and send us one last Polar Express that will have to be reckoned with but we think we’ve paid enough for oil this year.  And today I saw a good-sized butterfly fluttering around in the air.  And since the forsythia and the daffodils are both exploding in yellow bloom, I guess it makes sense for some insect to be pollinating them.  And finally, the raspberry leaves have burst from the ground all over the patch where I cut down the canes in March.  From what I can see this will be an even better sized crop than last year’s excellent results.  I’d say that the 10-10-10 fertilizer worked exactly as recommended.

We’re still waiting for Camera Girl’s pond liner to arrive from Home Depot.  It’s two days late and somehow “delayed” less than thirty miles away.  What can I say, Home Depot is not Amazon, that’s for sure.  When it arrives, I’ll bring out the shovel, pick, giant pry bar and wheel barrow.  I’m hoping there’s no ledge where she wants it to sit.  But knowing what I do about this property there will be a few monster-sized boulders below the surface.  Well, I’m sure there’s at least a few drops of ancient Egyptian blood in my Mediterranean ancestry so I’ll bone up on ramp building and practice singing spirituals.  Happy Wednesday!

How the Mighty Hath Fallen

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So, I put a chapter of “The Sniper” up on Royal Road about a week ago.  And shortly afterward I received a rejection from them because the story was also on Amazon and this website (OCF) and I had to prove to them that both those copies belonged to me.  They wanted me to add in my Amazon Jake Barter author page that I was putting the story up on Royal Road.  So, I had to figure out how to do that and whether this would cause a bad reaction by Amazon.  After all, Amazon sells my book for money and Royal Road lets people read it for free.  Well, the day before yesterday I tried putting up the statement about Royal Road but the author page rejected the edit.  It turns out that I couldn’t use Royal Road’s actual internet address on Amazon but I could just use the name of the site.  And then I had to prove that OCF was my website by a similar message and then, voila!  They put the first chapter of my book up on their site and so far, nine people have read it.  Well, that not much.  But I figure it’ll be fun to see if I can get much interest on that site.

Apparently, Gen Z frequents the site to read fan fic called “Lit RPG.”  Now, my book is neither fan fic nor Lit RPG.  So, it’s not certain that I will find an audience there.  But I’m interested in testing the waters.  I also put it up at BookFunnel and the good folks over at Whatfinger were kind enough to put up a link to that site and I got 14 e-mail addresses of people who downloaded the book there.  So, a little at a time I’m getting more visibility for the book.  I’m at 187 sales on Amazon and I’ve accumulated 34 ratings and 29 reviews with a cumulative rating of 4.7 and some very nice reviews that were definitely encouraging.

Once the experiments on Royal Road and BookFunnel have run their course I intend to put the book on KDP Select which requires the book to be exclusively on Amazon for at least 90 days.  Supposedly the low-cost barrier to reading on this program will attract the maximum number of “eyeballs” to the story and I’m very curious to see how that effects sales.  And I’m not particularly hoping to make a lot more money that way but rather I’m hoping for much more exposure.

So, the great book publishing experiment grinds on.  My hopes for international fortune and fame have been dashed on the sharp rocks of harsh reality.  My dream of movie studio executives battling each other in front of the Compound to see whose blockbuster offer would land the movie rights to this timeless masterpiece has gone up in smoke.  At this point I’m negotiating with the Dunwich Middle School to have the sixth grade put on a one act play version of Chapter 1.  Is this how Heinlein got started?  How, the mighty hath fallen.

Practical Applications of Riemannian-Bishopian Dimensional Translations – Part 1

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Dunwich is a very odd place.  First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England.  And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads.  On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it.  For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward.  And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits.  Strictly speaking there are no limits.  If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again.  And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road.  And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth.  And that’s not a good place to be.  So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic.  But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son.  It’s all a matter of geometry.  Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian.  And it is.  However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.

The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow.  On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space.  And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.

For the most part this kind of travel is a routine.  But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong.  I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly.  When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate.  I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past.  And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room.  I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp.  He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport.  Some people are like that.

Pass the Paschal Lamb

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Well, Easter has arrived and Camera Girl is killing the fatted calf (well, she’s serving beef anyway).  She’s going all out and in addition to the roast beast there will be lamb and a pasta course with the requisite meatballs and sausage, and various other paschal delicacies like stuffed mushrooms, rice balls and so forth.  So that means we’ll be stuffed to the gills by the time dessert is served.  She’s serving four different homemade cakes and various ice cream flavors along with Klondike Bars which are an especial favorite of several individuals (including me!).

All of this food will incapacitate some of the attendees (including me!).  Probably the girls will avoid the worst ravages as they are more moderate in their grazing and sluicing habits.  Whereas all three generations of men will be fighting over possession of the recliners in the living room to better accommodate their bulging stomachs and comatose brains.  I don’t assume there will be any great demand for movies from this tranquilized crowd but just in case I’m trying to decide what classic cinema I should have queued up for their viewing pleasure.  I think when I was a kid the choices were “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben Hur” or “The Wizard of Oz.”  Now “Ben Hur” is easily lined up with Easter.  “The Ten Commandments” also is linked since the Last Supper occurred on Passover and the movie chronicles the occasion of the first Passover.

But exactly what is the link between Easter and “The Wizard of Oz?”  I guess back in the 1960s the television networks must have had to pay top dollar to air that children’s favorite and they must have thought it would seem even more special if it happened when families gathered for a holiday.  I guess I can continue the tradition this year.  Well, unless the kids stage an insurrection and demand some vapid modern show.

Of course I could go another direction altogether.  A double feature of mid-century science fiction (let’s say “Them!” and “The Thing from Another World”) or W. C. Fields’ “It’s a Gift” and “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”  Both of these options would provide entertainment that greatly exceeds what would typically be found on the cable channels today.

But maybe what we should do instead is even more revolutionary.  Maybe we should sit around and talk.  After all, how often does the family all get together in one place and find out how we’re all doing?  There’s a lot going on in the family.  Businesses are being started, students are entering the work force.  There’s even a romance that will be represented at the table I believe.  That’s a lot to discuss.  Maybe that’s what we should do.  After all, pretty soon those finishing school will start dispersing far and wide and since I’m getting up there who knows how many more times, we’ll meet face to face.  So, I should take the opportunity to spend some time talking to them while I can.  I think that’s what I’ll do.  Let’s see how that works out.