The good news is that Chris Woods (aka Sid Swoorch for you Anagrandmas) is in town this weekend and we drove out to The Comicshop and Virgin Megastore. The bad news is that even with The Comicshop’s 30% off sale, I can’t justify spending 25 bones on a Hellboy graphic novel (or more for the amazing looking hardcover gn called simply “Lovecraft”). The good news is that at Virgin, Chris bought me the Tenacious D cd and the Tenacious D double disc DVD! Marlo “no voice” Carpenter and James “so voice” McBurney came over and we watched some of the stuff on the DVD – laugh riot. The other good news is that we annoyed the nice people at the Candy Aisle (which I’m sure you know is next door to The Comicshop) by coming in and out of the store by the back door. Hey, they left the door open. As a bonus, I bought a bunch of candy, including a Watchamacallit, my favourite foreign candy bar. Oh and also they had some really nice art books on Frazetta and Hellboy at The Comicshop too – I can totally write them off on my taxes but I should wait until Nov/Dec before I go all funny. Anyway I’ll be in Asia or New Zealand by then, right? RIGHT?! Sorry I’m swerving all over the blog road here….
So many things I had to do today! First, I played tennis with Sheri. Then I had to prepare Liam’s rpg project for pickup at 4:45. Then I had to go down to the bank*, and down to the record company to pick up some more Thickets CDs and drop off the artwork for Great Old Ones. (That reminds me I have to check to see if I have the DATS for GOO.) Then it was Chris’ art show and once there I had to remember to give Yvonne her Simpsons video tape, Marlo her Uzumaki books, and call Tea so that she could come and pick up a Thickets package (VHS, CD, photo) for a possible secret project. After 3 hours of chatting and meeting people we went to Denny’s (Chris & Ang and their relatives & Darren’s friend Simon, plus Stewie & Marlo & James & I) and then after that I went to Ursula’s to play Mario Party 3 with Anghold & Yvonne & Ursula. I would include the names of all the people at Chris’ show but it would require too much space and mental faculties. The point of all this is that I wore my brand new orange-striped black Converse – I broke them in. Christened them, if you will…(will you?)
Looks like there will be karaoke on Saturday after band jammin’. Sunday is D&D. I forget what I’m doing tomorrow and to make matters worse I can’t find my calendar! But I did get the trailer for Believers on DVD from Bob, so that’s keen.
*I did indeed initially forget to bring my camera to Chris’ show, but after I went to the bank I remembered that I forgot, and I came back to get it.
Two weird things that involve me in some way:
1. Email:
From: “Oren”
To: thickets@uniserve.com
Subject: You Blog
Hi there,
Really love you blog. Makes me laugh a lot.
Even put a link to it on mine: http://internetcircus.blogspot.com/
Have fun,
Oren
Chris’ show is today at 6pm at the Diane Farris Gallery (on the corner of West 7th and Fir – Fir is one street west of Granville) and I will see you there! I’m not 100% sure but I’m speculating we may go for dinner afterwards…maybe at Dennies if Chris holds true to form. Remind me to bring my camera.
Another idea I had was poetry readings. No seriously, I think it would be neat…until we get bored of it and move on to something else. For example, wouldn’t you like to hear me read Lovecraft’s The Fungi From Yuggoth? Or wouldn’t you? I imagine there is somewhere in town you could go for this, but I wonder if it would be as fun. And every time we could have it at a different place.
Yet another thing I don’t have time for…
I think it would be neat to have a weekly or bi-weekly (which means I have sex with both kinds of weeks) “tv series” events. People would come over and we’d start the first night with a bunch of first episodes – first episode of Buffy, first episode of X-Men Evolution, first episode of Futurama, etc…maybe 2 hours of that. Then the second time we have the event, we watch the second episodes. Third night, third episodes. You get the idea. Good idea or waste of over-ambitious claptrap?
I admit it.
I recently (Monday) learned that Jean Chretien is not our prime minister. This is indicative of my fondness for (and attentiveness to) politics, or lack thereof. And we’ve got an election coming up. Driving through Coquitlame, you see signs all over the place. I haven’t seen any such signs around my usual haunts (Fairview, downtown). So uh…yeah. I’m registered to vote (last time I checked) so I will now be soliciting suggestions & arguments as to how I should vote. I usually vote Green. Now, I understand that doing so may split the vote for another candidate who could otherwise possibly beat a less desirable candidate, but I wonder how long will that go on for? If nobody ever votes for the party they actually want to win the election because of that fear, how will that party actually ever win the election?
I’m bored.
Who’s been to New Zealand or knows somebody who lives there?
When I was in my 20’s I made up a connective mythology around my nightmares, inspired also by Lovecraft’s writing. Lovecraft himself had terrible nightmares, and he would sometimes use the fruit of his subconscious as monsters in his tales. For example, he dreamt of the facelessnightgaunts, and then used them in his novel The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and his poem The Fungi From Yuggoth.
I collected relevant nightmares in a file on my Mac, though the introduction of the document states that the collection is a book called the Liber Timoris and that the writings are the chronicles of a young drifting ascetic who spent his life trying to find out the source of his cursed visions. The book was divided into three sections: dreams transcribed, travel diaries, and scraps of information culled from other books – grimoires and the like – that help to tie the dreams to the mythos of the “deathless beyonders.” Oh yes, it’s true.
In short, I dreamt of (among other things): an ancient, massive metal tower that was built by a dead pre-human civilization for some arcane killing ritual, and a group of men were trying to unlock its secrets by sending people to their death in it; a green-glowing, amorphous, floating monster that comes out under moonless nights and calls out with an alien noise–like a siren, anyone who hears the call is drawn to it and then die at the sight of the monster; twin boiling, adhesive living oozes that stretch out of the earth to fight eachother at certain times in some cosmic cycle; a sleek, black, semi-canine, semi-humanoid beast that stalks & kills any intruder in its territory around a lake–it’s immortal but it exists alongside that which lives in the lake–an enormous rubbery globe of swollen tattered flesh that (when it surfaces) stretches probing tendrils (that look like male genitalia) and can reveal (with a mouth that looks like female genitalia) the secrets of how to survive/dismiss the other ‘stalker’; a race of marine humanoids whose skin resembles that of those black-mirrored, deep-sea, bioluminescent fish-they come out of the sea depths to complete secret errands and in their presence nobody who is sleeping can awake; travelling with a cult who travelled to a pier during a storm to summon up an immense rippling, semi-fluid, pink primordial thing from the sea which in turn slays the summoners with thrashing, acidic arms; being trapped in a room with row upon row of brown, twisted, man-eating creatures and seeing behind them, as they came towards me, a cyclopean monster-god trapped in a towering shard of ice, alive and using its powerful alien gaze to mercifully transport me away; A monumental, algae-encrusted, glyph-covered slab, raised by an ancient alien race, that through some evil force of will causes the R’lyeh-like city around it to crumble and slide into the sea; Being, in a canoe, told secrets of the universe by an old Indian medicine man, whose true nature–that of a three-eyed, bulbous, many-lobed alien thing with dark leathery skin–was revealed when rain hit his face, and who I killed by beheading with an oar; a desert human slave camp run by shadowy inhuman outsiders who stole babies and mounted them to coiled apparatus so that as the children grew they would grow into the metal constructs and become one with them for some unknown use in a war against other aliens, and this info was written down and smuggled out of the camp by a man who brought it to a secret temple, but he was followed by the outsiders and so he hid the book and took his own life to thwart them.
And Chris submitted a few of his weird dreams to the Liber Timoris as well!
This entry is dedicated to Janet’s weird nightmare.
I had a dream about driving to Montreal with Warren & the band and being constantly accosted by homeless people and/or hustlers and grifters. Which in reality was more like my trip to San Diego. Then I crashed the van down a ravine.
Stewie and I were up until 4:30 last night watching Shaun of the Dead, but we didn’t even finish it because we were too tired to go on. And then they started reconstructing the sidewalk along our street.