electricpaladin

The first verifiable opponent of the Great Old Ones is Howard Phillips Lovecraft, born in 1890 on Rhode Island. Before that, it is all conjecture. Some say King Solomon or his father, King David, or any number of the Hebrew prophets did righteous battle for the sake of mankind. Others attribute such heroism to figures as varied as Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Temüjin (better known as Genghis Kahn), Dogen (founder of Japanese Zen Buddhism), Tsui-Hung (Chinese Emperor 1082 to 1135), George Washington and numerous others. The only champion of humanity to leave a definitive record behind him, however, was Lovecraft.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's interest in the Old Ones began with his father's death by tertiary syphallis - or so the doctors claimed - and ended with his death in 1937. It is believed that Lovecraft died of stomach cancer, though there are those who claim that, like his father, his demise was brought about by the beings he fought for all our sakes. Certainly, he died in agony enough for their tastes.

Lovecraft did not fight the way his apocryphal predecessors did. Unlike George Washington, if the late President's fans are to be believed, he did nothing so overt as prevent British arcanists from unleashing the unspeakable beasts that sleep beneath the United States's eastern seaboard, or influence the planning of a city so that it focuses the psychic strength of a nation on keeping those beasts asleep for all eternity. Nor did he, like Dogen, single-handedly keep the Japanese Archipellago from being overrun by Deep Ones with the power of his ascetic meditation. Instead, Lovecraft created a weapon that will weild itself against the Great Old Ones throughout history, long after even his memory has passed into dust and out of this world.

Lovecraft created us.

Encoded in H.P. Lovecraft's stories is the knowledge we need to survive, to continue fighting the good fight against the Great Old Ones, their minions, their realms and their weaknesses. How many times have I stood in the Dreamlands and succeeded in finding my way to safety and success only because of some detail remembered from the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath? How many times have I almost dared to open an ancient tome before remembering the doom that Lovecraft foresaw for any who read its cursed words? How many times would I have died, or worse, were it not for H.P. Lovecraft? How many times would you? More times than I can count, certainly. At great cost to himself - Lovecraft was never happy, his marriage failed, and he died in poverty - Lovecraft mapped the darkness.

Lovecraft's immediate followers were, perhaps, more ambitious. Robert E. Howard certainly achieved more in the way of feats of physical heroism. Clark Ashton Smith's tomes on magic are practically required reading for those of us who use the arcane arts to fight the Great Old Ones, and I myself know several spells he created and many more that he merely translated or adapted. August Derleth, in one of humanity's rare acts offensives against our foes, greatly weakened the Great Old Ones by forcing upon them definition according to classical greek elements and Hippocrates's four humours. They are all heroes - all of us are heroes - but none of them surpass H.P. Lovecraft.

In my mind, Howard Phillips Lovecraft will always remain the greatest of them all and our leader in spirit. He led the way down the path we all walk. While we fight, he remains among us; we will fight forever, and so, he will never die.

As is often written by the righteous upon his tomb: "That is not dead which can eternal die, and with strange eons even death may die."

...

If you read all this, thanks for sticking with me. This particular example of rampant dreaming is, in fact, very carefully researched, and except for the obvious, there is nothing here that isn't true. I hope you enjoyed my (very) belated Rabbit Hole Day post.

Abby and I were having a discussion that ended on an interesting note.

I began by mentioning what it is about knowing that a character in a book I am reading is going to be raped that makes it harder for me to empathize with her. It is, I realized, because the idea of someone I am close to being raped scares me badly. Rape seems like this awful, somehow mysteriously powerful thing that can happen to someone I love while I'm not there to stop it, something that can change her, change our relationship, change everything, and there would be nothing I could do to stop it, and precious little I could do after the fact to help. It is the spectre of sudden, baneful, unstoppable transformation.

What's interesting is that Abby's response was that she feels the same way about war. That war is something awful and mysterious that could take a man in her life away for a long time, and then return him changed and damaged in a way that she could not prevent and could barely help repair.

It's an odd connection, but I wonder if has made it before.

I have come to an important - albeit completely non-serious - realization.

America is the evil empire, and the world is in deep shit.

Consider it thusly: we have a charismatic moron for a leader, but he is manipulated by shadowy manipulator types, as personified by his mysterious and grumpy second-in-command; we are expansionist, attempting to spread our hegemony, if not our direct rule, all over the globe; our own society is deeply unjust, with a definite elite and a definite underclass, and increasingly little upwards mobility; and we're religious! We're an evil empire dominated by a triumphalist religion!

Does anyone see where I'm going?

And to top it all off, our machines run on death. That's what gasoline is, liquid death. Dinosaurs and their ecosystem died, and the biomatter got squashed and heated and turned into gasoline.

All we need now is for gasoline burning engines to start moaning in pain or for Bush to reveal that the military has a new recipe for supersoldiers that involves dunking men in tanks of gas for several months to give them magic powers, and that's it. It's all over, folks. You're living in the United States of Mordor now.

[Anyone who takes this post seriously deserves what they get.]

This posting while eating cheerieos thing is becoming a habit. But I can't stop myself. It's too much fun.

Anyway, while I'm ranting about books, what the hell is so sexy about highlanders? The romance section is filled with highlanders. Also vampires, and time travelers. And vampire highlanders. And time traveling highlanders. And time traveling vampire highlanders (I am not shitting you).

What the hell? I mean, what is so sexy about a guy in a plaid skirt? I'm open-minded enough to see that the skirt shouldn't make them less sexy, but especially more? I'm lost.

Cheerieos are smaller than I remember them to be.

Tastier, too.

Odd, that.

I know it's silly, and largely an excuse for nudity, but I kind of feel a story coming on:



Suggestions?

For those of you who haven't heard the good news, I'm moving out. Not permanently, not really. It'll take many years for me to fully extricate myself and my belongings from my parents's house. Still, I am moving out of my home to a place owned (or at least rented) by me, paid for by my own money. I am moving out, which means sorting throug my belongings, which means coming to a very notable conclusion.

I own an absurd number of books.

It's kind of ridiculous. Going through just the books in the boxes in my closet and the contents of my main shelf has produced a largeish pile on the floor outside my door of books I am getting rid of, a slightly larger, much more orderly pile of books slated for transit to California (including my not-inconsiderable gaming collection), and pretty much the entire surface area of my bed, to a depth of about a foot and a half. That isn't counting about two thirds of the content of the smaller, over-door bookshelf, which I decided contained mostly books I'm not going to get rid of and was too much of a pain in the ass to get to, anyway. They range from the aforementioned roleplaying books - about ten Mage: the Ascension books, a similar number of Exalted books, a single, lonely and never used book for roleplaying in the Star Trek universe, Little Fears, and the GURPS supplement Illuminati University - to an uncountable number of softcover and hardcover science fiction and fantasy novels and anthologies, to about a score of more traditionally respectable fiction, with a considerable amount of non-fiction, mostly old college textbooks of various sorts, thrown in.

Getting rid of books has always been hard for me. It doesn't make any sense. For some of the books, I understand. There are books I remember enjoying a great deal that I might want to read again one day. There are books I enjoyed and won't read again, but don't want to throw away out of some sense of comraderie. There are children's books I would honestly like my own children to read one day. There are books here I have had since I was a kid that I know I will not and do not want to read again, books that will be obsolete by the time I am in the business of making and raising children of my own. There are books of no discernable value, but when I move towards the pile of books slated for sale, donation, and elimination, I find myself hesitating. This is a book, a part of my says, and worthy of keeping.

I can't keep them all, but I want to. It even bothers me to get rid of two of my three copies of Abraham Joseph Heschel's The Sabbath. Two of three! It's crazy.

Actually, crazy would be not getting rid of them. I can't afford to keep this many books. I need to be somewhat mobile for the next few years of my life to work. First to California, then to Jerusalem, then to God and the HUC admissions committee know where. Everything important has to be taken with me, and everything I might need has to be easily accessible.

I don't mean this to be a metaphor for leaving home and growing up. Honestly, I'm more anxious about being able to do my jobs than I am about the prospect of living elsewhere. Compared to teaching sixth graders, leading teen agers, and performing five hours of office work a day, ballancing a checkbook feels like a piece of cake, despite the fact that I don't really know the first, second, or third thing about checkbooks. What I mean this to be is a brief moment of relaxation between taking everything out of my bookshelf and putting it back in, a stream-of-consciousness rest break, a quiet time to reflect on something I now know to be indisputably true.

I own a lot of books.