(no subject)

[kingtycoon]

I think on a fundamental level a lot of the Elder-Gods and mythos creatures from Lovecraft & his imitators falls flat for me simply because I think the octopus & it's allied species are so charismatic.

Black Goat in the Woods has a very distinctive flavor to it - something scary to it, but also kind of helpless - the domestic animal lost in the woods.

Once - we were in AZ - I was on a trip with my family - and this would've been in High School - we went to Las Vegas and I was too young to do the stuff you're supposed to do there. I ended up walking around with my video camera talking to the rows & rows of weird stragglers all up and down the strip. It was the last time I went to Las Vegas and I still am surprised when people actually want to go there. I didn't get it. Anyhow - we went to AZ to see the Grand Canyon - cause why not right? And in this dinky hotel in rural arizona I'm messing around in my room looking at the movie I'd been making - I was deep in movies then - I worked at the video store, we'd made a bunch of almost-good parody movies using Tim N.'s video-toaster enabled amiga - we were half serious right? Anyhow I'm going over my movie & messing with it and then there's a horse - night in the rural dark frontier (whatever, AZ is all 'the country' if you ask me) - and there's a horse broken loose - it's charging up and down the street - foaming at its withers even - it's charging and has a wild rolled up sheen in its eye. There's startled screaming and everyone looking around for the person who can take command of the horse - who is supposed to deal with this thing. That's a helpless, really uncanny feeling - that there is wildness and confusion in our midst and who among us is fit to contend! There is a ponderous sense of the fragility of civilization that even our most loyal servants are a beat away from wildness, from stampeding & destroying. And where are we without the powerful voice of calm & steady - who is fit to contend - to tame the wild beast.

In Gilgamesh there's that bit where Gilgamesh the King fights the bull of heaven in the streets of Uruk - I bet that image was strong - in antiquity you know - when a wild bull in the middle of town - when that was a threatening danger & maybe a common one.

I was reading that there's no native words for Bear in most languages. Bruin & Bear - our words - they refer to the color because Anglo-Saxon people & Norman people - they wouldn't call the Bear by its real name - it was too terrible, they called it little nicknames - and those were retained. Supposedly this is common to many languages. Arctos, the greek word means just Destroyer. Destroyer! What I mean is that these images of animals are the things that are meant to conjure a sense of horror.

In prehistory it was wild animals, in antiquity it was domestic animals becoming wild. So in Postmodernity we have Cthulu and Zombies - y'know- anthropomorphized others. They don't work on me - being scared of people is just plain weird to me. But I was spooked of the horse. Running wild - the horse-masked-wilderness the dark open places incurring upon the world. Like the wild dog packs of Cleveland - it's not the breakdown of the social order that matters, but the failure of the natural order.

Anyhow the aquarium has these tortoises


The deal with them is they start out as little pets & after 40 years grow to be 100lb titans - so there's no shortage of betrayer pets that need rescuing & relocating to an aquarium? Betrayer pets - maybe that's the scariest thing no? I admit, I've a hard time understanding being scared of things so I don't know, but I wonder for reasons.


Anyway the aquarium was pretty satisfactory. And just a part of our day - you know- it started out Saturday - because after dinner, our Dinner & milkshakes on friday she wanted to go stay with her friends & was allowed & then brought home on Saturday - I had a little impromptu company on friday instead of solitude & didn't enjoy it a whole lot but I had an adequate time. Company.

On saturday walking around - going to the cat-store on Coventry where my friend is soon to be out of work - he says, it's closing - I stop in often and have no pets - what do then? Talk to your friend. They're almost sold out. Then it's home - late afternoon & I decide on Uber- my first attempt at this - thinking of it after my friend the petstore man says he's going to it for his living now - and so has Melchior - in their laid off states they drive people around. Anyhow- I tried it out & was alright about it. To the Aquarium & then a long walk in a fading summer - over & up out of the flats we make it up to 25th passing over those spreads of sidewalk overgrown & even shattered by encroaching plants, gullies bridged but seeming to be, under the crumbling concrete spans - nothing more than flowing rivers of vines & green. I think of this as a miracle - nature & incursions. But it's a moment until you're up on 25th - going past the the Laughing-Academy - crazy people you know - like runaway horses - like a wildness set loose to overturn human dominion. Past there to the ice-cream factory. She never gets a cone - Youngster Agatha - always a bowl. I say: "If you pass up on the waffle cone I think a little bit that you are a barbarian."
But she says that I'm a barbarian since I have a beard. "And you don't act right ever... Dad." We have fun together.
But aren't there those people - who are on about dairy? Cheese as the acme of civilization? If they said that they're mad- caramelized chocolate ice-cream in a waffle cone - served fresh at the factory - that's civilization's apogee says I. Industrial institutional processes and the integrated supply chain.

After all that it's dinner with my folks and then home and then other things - a drifting fading weekend, dreamy & dissolute - but school starts today and I've got a mountain of unkillable SQL complications - so it's right to be idle on the last weekend in August.

It's what passes now, for the Best Day. IF you can believe it.

Comments

[meowlet.livejournal.com]

The cuttlefish is my favourite.

Pointless Morbidity!

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

The Cuttlefish is boss indeed.

I've read some scholars who point out how smart the cephalopods are and then indicate that they don't live long enough (the poor things) to really get to be all that smart. Like, if they made it 20-30 years then they'd be cleverest of all, but the Cuttlefish only gets 3 years or so!

It makes me sad - like thinking of a little kid dying young...

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it make you think the same thing is probably true of humans, but like scaled up?

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

I mean, Barbarian is totally what you are going for I thought.