Cool Zon Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff the podcast. That's always Margaret reading fiction to Prop. That's been the setup of the show the entire time, as well gaslight you and believing in it.
I don't know why I keep saying cool people and is not just cool person?
Yeah, well it was because you too. It's all three of us. We're all cool people.
Oh yeah, we're cool, says Margaret.
We are us.
The voices you're hearing in case you didn't listen to part one is Prop and Sophie. Hi, how are you all doing?
Hi?
We are us. You know what I'm saying. Dodgers are in the World Series. Yeah, Lakers have won a game a game. Yes, it's great being from Los Angeles for the next two days.
I can bring myself to care about basketball so much more than I can bring myself to care about baseball.
Yes see, here's the trick. No, I'm vibe with that. The trick is caring about Los Angeles.
Okay, huh, it's not that care about baseball. But like the Dodgers, that's culture.
That's culture exactly. The Dodgers are culture.
Yeah, I know that makes sense.
I don't watch Baseball till the playoffs, and only if the Dodgers are playing correct, you know, So like, yeah, it's it's culture.
It's literally culture, So.
That's what you care about.
I mean, I grew up watching the team that shall not be named because I grew up outside d c M. And so that was the that was the culture of watching the Yeah, watching the did they they only changed their name to like the Washington Sports team or something? What did they change their name?
Commander It's Commanders now, oh okay, yeah, yeah, but yeah it at first it was the Washington Football.
Club, yeah, which I thought was hilarious.
Yeah, but it's Commanders now. Yeah.
But then everyone who like was into the culture of that got really annoying during all of that, and so then I stop paying any attention to it. I know, everyone tunes in to hear my opinion.
About all our all our opinion on sports.
Yeah, well you all actually have opinions about sports, so they're actually interesting.
I have a good balance within like our group of friends of like us who like really like sports, but we are self aware enough to relegate that to its own group text, you know, and like it's fine, like we're not going to subject everybody else to our meme sharing.
I spent so long hitch hiking, and the secret to hitchhiking is to just learn what the other person is interested in and then become interested in it.
Yeah.
Facts, so also the secret of dating.
Yeah that makes sense.
How many do you?
Many friends of mine that like, do not watch a single minute of sports, but they come over and they watch me watch sports, or they like the other day, I have a friend and I won't I won't name it. My friend spit out a lebron fact like no other and I was like, chills, My soul is.
Just kind of.
And then she and then she knew who the enemy was too. She knew that's important. She's like, oh, was that the guy that got the game winner that made you so unhappy that one time? And I was like, yes, yes it was actually, yes.
Yes, yes it was, yes it was Yeah.
Beautiful.
That is a good love language.
It really is. You know, like, if you are listening and you're on the apps, we're giving you incredible game. Just just pay attention and be curious and let yourself be teachable and don't be weird. Maybe I'm talking to the to the cis hep fellas. You know what I'm saying, like, can't give nobody else because that's all I know, you know, So like I'm saying, as cis hep, like just just listen and be curious, ask questions and don't be weird. Just don't be weird.
Don't be weird.
Don't be weird. Do you see this person is into sports? Hey? Who's your team? Wow? That's dope. Do you go to bars to watch games? Oh? Cool? I found a bar that's down the street. Maybe we could go watch it there, like you see all that's just like, yeah, let's go watch the game.
Yeah, I'll see. That's another one. Probably so mad right now.
I'm so frustrated because it's just like this is nothing, like this is our scooky season stuff because I just.
Be like, in a way, is there anything scarier?
Yeah? Trying to dating a man, trying to date straight man?
Yeah, like why y'all so weird? Like I just I get so frustrated because of you know, just like the mannosphere stuff where I'd be like, fellas, like boys, where are your antennas? Like you know this man talking about he got seventeen bitches a day? Okay, words, So a man with seventeen bitches, right, who make one hundred thousand dollars a day on their online store? Why they's selling
you classes? Don't you think if you had seventeen bitches and one hundred thousand dollars a day, you would have time to be online on TikTok selling people where is your Antenna's? Fellas like, I'm sorry, no.
But see this is actually frustrated me about other things too, Right, where I like, whenever I want to go, like I watch music production videos, right, I'll go on YouTube and I'll be like, I want to learn how the following style is produced. But everyone's just trying to sell you the service of like of the classes. And I'm like, yeah, I don't want. I want someone who makes music for a living, not someone who sells online classes for a living.
I mean, real teachers are real teachers. But it gets so scammy so quick, and I'm like, it's so annoying to sort through. Who's actually so annoying?
Man? And just like yeah, I just I'm like, Fellas, it's like it's really it's really not that serious. Player, like just it's not that serious. Just it's what do you like if you're into something. Would you like people to ask you questions about the stuff you into? Do you like sharing the things that bring you joy? Okay, so do other humans? Uh? Read the story? Read the story, mad guy.
We're going to read stories. That's why we're here for Spooky Week. As Sovieks correctly pointed out, the scariest thing is dating men.
But apologize. I apologize. No, No, I mean you know, I gotta own it. No, listen, you listen. I had to tell me that, Like, listen, if you're in the front of a line, that is your line, you are responsible for the dudes in the back of the line. They still that's still your line, you know. So I'm like, you're right, that's still my line.
Yeah. Anyway, well it's okay because I don't have any I'm not in the white line, so it's wait no, yeah I am.
Yeah, good for you. Yeah.
So I'm going to read you a story speaking of racists. Uh have you ever read Lovecraft?
Because of exactly what you're talking about, Like, I do not need I do not need this for for fun. Yeah.
So what I'm going to read you is a story that was for a an anthology of people reacting to Lovecraft. Okay, and so because I grew up reading some Lovecraft, but I kind of pretty quickly learned that he was this horrible racist, where like, literally I can't say the name of his cat, you know, that's how racist he is. Like that, But I thought it would be fun to write a story in which I claim that Lovecraft stole
all of his ideas from a black man. Oh so, okay, that's the story I'm going to read for you.
What is happening? All right?
And I don't think you know, it's going to talk about Lovecraft. This story is going to talk about Lovecraft. But I think it should work. You know, I haven't read everything Lovecraft's written, and you know, for the aforementioned reasons.
I'm here for it.
Yeah, this story is called The Bones of Children to most of society. I am a monster. I don't have tentacles or horns or goat's feet or anything of the sort. Nevertheless, the first entry of Lieber Monsterum, the oldest known Western book of monsters, is a man who dresses as a woman. That part's true, by the way, actually, uh oh, and then yeah, the first I'm no longer reading the story.
I'm just telling you a thinking yeah, I figured the first book of Monsters is just fucking the first page as a trans woman, and then like page three as a black man, you know, like it's.
Like, you know, what's scary?
Yeah, yeah, exactly, and then it's like a chimera after timura whatever, like a fucking you know, like centaurs and shit.
Yeah.
Anyway, sure, I'm a woman who dresses like a woman, but most of society doesn't believe me about that, because trans women are still seen as deceivers. That book was written sometime in the seventh or eighth century, and I'm not entirely certain I can say that much has changed. It's strange, then, that I should wind up hunting after monsters. It's strange that I should be referring to ancient tomes,
both real and fictional, as potential sources of truth. It's strange that I should come to take loved crafts works far too seriously, especially considering what I assume he would make of me. It's strange that I should be searching in atticts for portals into unknown and unknowable dimensions. Okay,
that last bit would be strange for anybody. I mean to say, only that I was a reluctant scholar of the occult, as though any claims I might make of my inherent skepticism will make what I have to relate any more believable. I want to be clear that I understand HP Lovecraft to be a writer of fiction. I don't think he believed any of what he wrote to
be true. His work is fanciful, and while his prose was outdated even for the time, I enjoy his ability to weave stories and touch at the horror hidden inside the human mind.
Took all of me not to interrupt you and go, let's be clear immediately.
Yeah, hey, let's be clear.
It's just embedded in my brain.
Wrot is fucking Lovecraft stuff.
No, oh, Barack Obama, Barack Obama.
Let's oh shit. Oh okay yeah yeah, second.
Said, I was like, oh, it's like, my brain is rot.
It's mush.
What I've come to believe, however, and what I expect to fail to convince you of, is that HP Lovecraft worked from sources, sometimes near to plagiaristically, that were not nearly so fictional. It started with my dreams. I've always been a deep sleeper, never bothered much by dreams. No dreams so beautiful that waking life cannot compare. No dreams
so horrid that I wake up screaming. I've always had mundane, forgettable dreams until two years ago, in my fifth decade of life, I moved in with a partner, a woman named E. Two years ago, along with a small group of miscreants and queers, we'd bought a derelict farm in western Massachusetts. Everyone else wanted to build their own houses on the property, so E and I moved into the
old farmhouse. Things were fine for the first six months when we lived in the library on the ground floor, but as soon as we finish renovations on the master bedroom and moved upstairs, the dreams started. Most of the dreams, though bizarre, were non egregious. I had dreams about washing blades and washing bones in a skyscraper overlooking a dead city. The city was always the same, full of brutalist structures,
shorter than the tower. The tasks I was engaged and changed from dream to dream, but they were always mundane and generally contained enough traces of what I'd done that day to convince me that nothing untoward was happening to my mind as I slept at midwinter, I dreamt of carving a living child into quarters. As I dreamt of piercing his skin, my hands shook. The visceral feel of it made me want to wretch or cry or stop,
but I did none of those things. As I pulled bones from sockets, my whole body shook so hard that I woke. I wanted E to hold me, but she slept every night with the help of pills, haunted by her own nightmares, as she had had been since her youth. So I held her instead and cried into her hair. Only in the morning did I notice the dried blood beneath my fingernails. It was E who told me that my dream reminded her of a Lovecraft story, The Dreams of the Witch House, and set me on the terrible
path I walked today. I listened to an audio production of the story the next day while I worked in the garden. Then I devoured book after book, after story after poem by H. P. Lovecraft. Every word he'd put to paper felt like it hit some discordant note in my soul. Okay, I don't believe in soul, so let's say brain. Everything he'd written was so close to yet so far from some truth. I knew it in my heart and by heart again, I mean brain. In the story the City of the Elder Things is lit by
three stars, one red, one yellow, one blue. In my dreams, that dead Brutalis city had three yellow sons, and it had buildings suited for people, not winged demon barrels. So close, get so far away. A few weeks later, I had another dream about another human sacrifice. I still didn't believe the dreams, but I assure you I went over every inch of that bedroom with tape measure to prove the euclidian nature of its geometry. In the end, I started
sharing ease medication, and the dream subsided. Thank the Lord, and by the Lord, I mean pharmacology and the sponsors of this show, which probably include sleep aids. I don't know. Try keep getting me. I started doing this like a very long time ago. I would read my partner stories and then I would just change them as I was reading them, like not stories i'd written. I'd be reading her some book and I'd be like, and then, yeah, I've learned I should probably just write instead.
Was it like waiting for her to catch on?
Yeah? I think so. It's also a good way to test if like someone's falling asleep when you read to them totally is he then like you then like say their name and just like work in the story and they're.
Like yeah, uh huh yeah yeah. Oh, I as the parent of a nine year old who we just now stopped reading our stories at night. Yeah, and like barely, like it'll rather than every night now it's like down to four to five nights.
Yeah.
We all fall asleep before she does, like as me reading, or if I'm in the room while Alma's reading, I'm dozing off, like she's putting me to sleep. Yeah, it's just it's great.
One of my one of my best friends, listens to my podcast to go to sleep. So now when I when I hang out with him, he's like, oh, I'm getting kind of tired whenever he talked to him.
Man, yeah, stop talking.
It's so funny.
Yeah.
Anyway, what puts me to sleep are the ads? Here they are and we're back. None of my landmates, least of all, my partner wanted to discuss the matter with me. He herself had lost a child to sit and I knew better than to push the issue of dead children. I did what any girl would do in the same situation. I joined a support group for the Lovecraft obsessed. A few friends from Boston had been into all this occult shit, so I hit them up and started going to meetings,
driving the couple hours every week. They didn't call them support group meetings. And if there had been twelve steps, they would have been the twelve steps for summoning Yog's a thoth or something, not the steps for ridding oneself of eldritch nightmares. Yeah no, Lovecraft had terrible names for everything.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
I still used it as a support group. Everyone had stories about occurrences and observations of the uncanny and arcane. I didn't believe any of them, and I eventually realized I thought they were idiots for believing me. Still attending seemed to quiet the growing nagging sensation in the back of my throat, in the back of my mind. It stopped for a few blissful hours, the ever present sensation
I had under my fingernails of rending and tearing. It stopped the chanting the demonic mantras that broke into my consciousness as intrusive thoughts. A man named Why was at almost every meeting. He was a young, attractive, light skinned black man with old fashioned spectacles perched perilously on the
edge of his nose. He always had a different book sticking out of his coat pocket, and he always kept his eye on the door of wherever we met, often a bookstore's basement or some diy show space that would never pass fire code. For months, he never said a word. Along with the other women and people of color who came, we shared a sort of illicit bond. We were the sorts that Lovecraft reviled, and that brought us together. At least I assumed it did. Maybe that was just me
as a white girl projecting. One night in early May, at least fifteen of us crowded into the back room of a punk owned pizza joint after clothes. We just heard from another woman with dreams of child sacrifice frighteningly similar to my own, though hers took place in a birch forest. When Why walked to the center of the room to speak, I'm going to find the witch house,
he said. That's what Lovecraft called it, right, the witch house, a boarding house with the bones of children in the walls, with a person faced rat in a timeless witch, a house with an attic room. You can't measure right, it's real. I'm going to find it. The room got so quiet we heard a bicycle pass on the street. Most of you don't know me well enough to know I'm a cat burglar by trade, but I am. It pays me
well enough. I don't have to work more than once or twice a year, and I'm good enough at my job that even if you ratted me out to the cops, they wouldn't be able to pin anything on me. I don't think. He looked around the room as he talked. Gone was the quiet, shy man i'd seen for months. In his place was a man who was charismatic, outgoing,
with a sort of infectious enthusiasm. I started coming here to this group because of a book I found robbing a place last year in let's just say, a different city, a real far north city. I got a tip about a rare book collector who didn't treat people very well. And I like sleeping at night, so I like robbing people like that. I got in the front door because people think having their locks and alarms and cameras wired into the internet is a good idea, made my way to the library and took my fill.
Such a good line, thanks, and think plugging their locks to the internet. It's a good idea, like yeah, maybe that's yeah, anyway going.
I sold off the esoteric pornography in the overpriced occultist groups easily enough, but some of what looked interesting to me was much harder to find buyers. For a few things were so rare I couldn't safely move them without going through so many middlemen that I wouldn't make shit. And a few were just so weird that I couldn't figure out how and where to list them, let alone
figure out how to advertise them as worth anything. He walked back over to his chair, picked up his book bag, and pulled out a stack of pamphlets and plastic sleeves. He held up one, yellow aged its tattered cover, but in black letter font I could see the title Ruminations on non Secular Matters. He held up another, The Church of Christ the Weeping Man, a third Underneath The Dreams of Men, a final inside the Stars of Gods. I looked around the room. All of us were almost hungry
with desire for those books. Whatever they held, that was the sort of obsession. This group fostered that I was participating in. All of these works are anonymous, all of them can be dated to the turn of the twentieth century. None of them exists on the Internet, even as references or in library catalogs. They're written in fairly different styles. If I'd had to guess, I'd say Dreams of Men and Stars of God have one author, and the other
two were written by two different people. And if I'll cut right to it, the thing is, I am convinced that Lovecraft read these and maybe others in this series. I am also convinced that these are works of journalism. I gasped. I was kind of embarrassed by the gesture and put my hand over my mouth. But there it was.
Why didn't you say anything? One of the more cumbersome of our group asked, that was G. I think there were three types of people in attendance, the curious who came for entertainment, the cursed like myself, who came to find answers. Then there were the true believers, who just wanted something to be interesting in this world, and it attached themselves to Lovecraft. For whatever reason. G was a true believer. I should be kinder to the true believers,
but they grated on me. G was the worst of them. Like Lovecraft, I assumed they were fiction, But after hearing everyone's stories during the past months, I found myself doubting one of these, in particular, with this he held up underneath. The Dreams of Men is so startlingly similar, not to Lovecraft's dreams in the Witch House, but to some of the stories I've heard you all tell. I got sort of obsessed. Everyone turned to look at me and the
other woman with the sacrificial dreams. In the Dream of Men, our journalist author relates the story of an old man he meets known only as X. He's ebony black, and he describes himself as a free man, the son of a free woman, the daughter of a slave. When he was younger, before the war, X took up residence in a boarding house in upstate New York. He's subject to a fair amount of racial abuse at the hands of the matron of the house, some of the white guests,
and even from another black guest with lighter skin. To get away from everyone, he ends up taking the worst room, the attic room. Things aren't right up there, and he hears things, he sees things, he can't make sense of it. He starts dreaming. In his dreams, he's sacrificing children in a strange city. He wakes up every morning with bones at the foot of his bed, and every morning he packs them into the walls and goes a little bit crazier.
One day he wakes up with a statue about a foot high of a satyr or a devil, made out of some metal he can't figure out, with writing across the bottom in letters he doesn't recogniz eyes. Then what happens? I asked, I'd never woken up to bones, but it still felt like I was asking about my own future. That's about the sum of it, why, said X. Moves out after a year when he can't handle it anymore,
and settles in Maine. Becomes a lobster fisherman because lobsters don't have bones and fishermen don't have to deal with people much. Throws the statue into the ocean. After a couple years of staring at it. The journalist relates his story, adds a couple notes about failing to find any of the people or places he's referenced, plus some nineteenth century theories about dreams and their meaning. And that's it. I've got a lot of free time, what with my generous
work schedule. I never found out the author of the text, but I've been trying to track down the subject of this story. Two weeks ago I found him. He was real Xavier Day. Thank god his name started with an X or I probably never would have found him, but a black as night lobster fisherman was let's go with, something of a rarity in nineteenth century Maine, so that helped. He lived on a town near Lubeck. He's buried in
an overgrown cemetery on private land. Near as I can tell, the town was too racist to bury him in the churchyard, or maybe they considered him a witch. Here's a photo of his stone. Why passed around his phone. The stone was hard to read and completely unadorned. This says he lived from eighteen twelve till nineteen twenty five. I said that can't be right. I looked into that. Why said, it's what he claimed, and no one had evidence otherwise.
He told people he figured he was immortal. How'd he die? I asked, drowned? What's this In the lower left of the photo, I asked, There was a blur of something yellowish white, a pile of something on his grave. Go to the next photo, Why said it did? They were bones? Bones? Why said, the bones of children. For a long moment, no one said a word. I passed the phone on and everyone stared in disbelief. Then theatrically Why reached into his bag and pulled out a statuette and placed it
on the table. I did some diving, Why said, and I found this. It was a devil in that Christian style of a man with Caucasian features and the legs of a goat. A band of Norse ruines encircled the base. What does that say? G asked Why, And I answered at the same time, Neil r Hotep. And this is now a new scene. That's the name of one of Lovecraft's million things with a million weird names.
Oh tep Oo. Tep has a has a fun history.
Yeah, I actually need to do more research about how it relates to I don't know, do you know more about like the hotep thing that currently exists?
Uh? Yes, I do.
I assume Lovecraft basically just was like, what's a scary sounding word from a foreign culture?
Yeah, that's what they're doing. Yeah yeah, but we we use that as a term for a black man that's like full misogyn noir, overwoke, like just just annoying, like just like Doctor Umar, which I think would be a great Uh well I don't think of bastards, but like it's just a great, Like he's not a bastard, it's but it's just like just just you do it too much, like you know, a strong black man and a strong black woman. No, you know, a strong black woman should support his black men.
Sixteenth minute maybe sixteenth.
Minute would be great about doctor Umar. Yeah uh yeah, but yeah, just a hotep like I don't play pool because the game ain't over to the white ball hits the black ball into the hole like all right, maam, all right man. Yeah, so it's just okay.
It reminds me a little bit of Uh. There's this fucking piece of shit black metal Nazi guy named burzum and Uh and he like writes these long screens about how he stopped playing guitar in his metal band because it's a it's an N word instrument, what a banjo.
It's from West Africa.
Yeah, yeah, he only plays synthesizer. He's a fucking asshole.
Ah, what a dork.
Yeah, I have a standing offer to fight that man to the death.
Anyway, the joy of a dude like that, just getting the dog shit beat out of him, Yeah, by a trans woman, Yeah, would just be the most glorious. Like, I mean this is tangential.
But like, yeah, one of my friends showed me this tweet from his friend that was like, damn man, Like I got to fight with this gay dude and ended up jumping me.
That beat the shit out of me. And he was like he was like, as I got my ass kicked by a gay man, he was like, well there's still men. Yeah, Like I don't, like, what are you talking about, Like, he's still a man. Yeah, so yeah he beat your ass, like.
Yeah, and he knows how to fight because he's a gay man dealing with the world.
Yeah, yes, you know that a fight because he's a gay man.
Yeah. I love that people think that like queer people are softer.
And I'm like, like, what is you talking about, Like you know, like clearly you don't know any Yeah.
Yeah, all right, so the story and I almost feel bad. I'm like, now I'm reading it aloud. This is a very like everything is about this like book that references this other book and shit. But I just like things that get all weird and esoteric.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, let's get let's get Russian doll.
Yeah, let's do it. At our insistence, why read each of the four pamphlets to us. We stayed so late that night that we only left when an employee came to open the restaurant in the morning. For the curious, this was the best entertainment they'd had in ages. For the true believers, it was vindication For us cursed well, I didn't know what to believe or what to think. I still don't. Over the next week we tracked down
that boarding house in New York. It's one of the only parts in this whole thing I can take any credit for. My family is from upstate, and one of my aunt's studies regional folklore and another studies regional history. There was a town where kids of the nineteenth century had died young and the old had seemed to live past one hundred. No one told ghost stories about the place. Every other town in New York has ghost stories about them, but this one it was so conspicuously unhaunted that it
was clearly haunted. It wasn't a town anymore, but a few buildings remained, most of them on the state's historic registry. That's how I found myself in the company of a gentleman thief, as we scaled the outside wall of a witch house under the light of a full moon. Old fashioned security means old fashioned method of entry, Why told me as he opened the storm shutters of the attic
window with a crowbar. I'd wanted to take a tour during the day and slip away from the guide, but Why had insisted what we needed to do required the dead of night. The attic room was wrong. That much was obvious. It was unnameably wrong, though almost indescribably so. Like that feeling when you're trying to put on fishnets and they're tangled in more than one direction at once, and you have to somehow unroll them in both directions at the same time. That's what it felt like looking
at the room. There were four walls and a vaulted ceiling, but sometimes it felt like there were five walls. And when I stood, I got a trace of vertigo, like I was high in the air, like I was in that skyscraper looking out over that city, sharpening knives. I wanted to leave. We've got to pry open the walls carefully, Why said, let me try. He handed me the crowbar. I smashed it into the nearest wall, putting my hip into it like swinging a bat and little League again again.
There was no carefully left in my body. I needed answers. Bones came pouring out as the wall fell down, the bones of children. And I don't have a way to go into ads from that, but I'm gonna here's ads.
Sheesh, and we're back.
After that night, I spent a month trying to convince E and the rest of my friends to sell the land and move somewhere else, anywhere else. It became clear, however, that she didn't believe me, and she wouldn't come with me, so I left her. The dreams haven't come back, not since I left that place. Instead, I dream of E and I miss her. I live with Why now and a few of the other cursed ones from the group.
I think investigating this shit is driving me as crazy as the dreams had, but I don't know what else to do. I can't get it out of my brain. I can't forgive myself for the monster I was in my sleep and some alien city across the cosmos. I understand now that I was sacrificing real children to a devil I don't believe in now. Whenever I cut anything, even vegetables, I think about human flesh. Whenever I see the concrete of a city, I think about the three suns.
Whenever I imagine the rest of death, I think about who or what will leave mementos of horror on my grave. Worst of all, when I see children, I think of their bones. Yep, that's that story. Wow.
Oh word, okay yo. The chill that like shot down my back when he was like, I think it's journalism. Hey, I mean I knew you were good at this, but like, see was amazing you good at this? Yeah?
Thank you? This story was really fun. I tell you the story behind this.
Yeah, yeah, tell me the story.
So these people were putting together this like love Craft anthology of responses to Lovecraft and stuff, and someone got me too it out of the table of contents at the last minute, basically like someone who was going to have a story in it did some real terrible stuff and so and so they were like, who do we know we think can turn around a story in like a week. Who writes horror, who doesn't sexually assault anybody?
And that's how you got here.
Yeah, so I got in and so and then it's funny because I almost I almost always write sober. I got drunk in the middle of the day, wrote this entire story, sent it to a friend of mine to do like sensitivity reading because the's a lot of black characters in it.
Yeah.
I was like, so I sent it to my friend and like we made some changes, and then I sent it off to the editor, all while I was still drunk on the same day.
A machine. Yeah that's what that means.
Yeah, no, totally, yeah, because it was like I'd done it enough that I could just do it, you know.
Yeah. And the real, like the other level of psychological horror is the reality of how much actually can trace its origins back to a black person.
Yeah, totally.
There's so much of the world that is like, oh yeah, that was yeah, that was us. Yeah yeah, yeah, we invented that too, you know, and just so just being like oh again, you know, like yeah, yeah.
No, yeah, it's like that's kind of what I'm trying to reference. Is that so much gets stolen from black culture. Yeah, I have no evidence that Lovecraft stole any of the shit. I just know that hated black people, and I think it's fun to troll him even though he's dead, you know, of course.
Yeah, it's kind of in the vein of like get out and like the Jordan Peel stuff to where you're like, this is the the haunting like actual funny fear behind really nice like bleeding liberal white people where you're just like is it wait wait you know, like yeah, so so that's so that's like kind of like to me, it's like it's in that vein of like damn even Lovecraft was.
Even that, you know what I mean, Like yeah, okay, So I think all the time, like the thing that Lovecraft isn't famed for inventing but he didn't invent is this idea of like cosmic horror. And it's the style of horror that's about fear of sort of the unknowable, not just the unknown, but the things that are too complex where you go crazy if you think about them
too hard. And it's it's funny because one of my friends made the argument to me that all cosmic car is rooted in racism, and for for Lovecraft, it one hundred percent was right. Like the idea of like going into Brooklyn was so bad that he wrote the like it's called like the Horror of Red Hook or I can't remember, yeah, you know, and he like wrote constantly about how terrified he was of people who didn't look
like him. Right, dude, But I hold that cosmic car is real because that's how I feel about things from under the ocean.
Yes, I know they not they're technically not aliens. I know that because it's the same planet, it's the same carbon, and yeah, I get it, but still, like nothing should look like that.
Yes, it gets the piss out of me.
Yeah, I still think things as basic as jellyfish. Yeah, like this shouldn't exist jellyfish. Yeah, this shouldn't be a thing. There shouldn't be mammals the size of buses. Yeah, yeah, there shouldn't. You I'm I'm with it.
Yeah, I respect their right to exist over there in the ocean, and then I will stay away from the ocean.
Just be over there, like that's exactly we don't have gills. Yeah, you know, I'm good and that I'm good, But then the ship that makes me even most scary is like they don't all have gills either.
Yeah, no, it's true. They come up for air.
We else have lungs. And I'm like, you're not supposed to be that big, yeah, and live in the water. You can't breathe the water. This shouldn't exist. I know I'm yelling, but you tapped into some I'm telling listen you, I'm fascinated. But I'll watch you on that geo and be marveling. But like jellyfish over there, that's a that's a clear that's a nervous system. Yeah, it is clear, and it's a nervous system. That's all that thing is.
Yeah, and some of them will kill you, and.
They could Margaret killed Joy. The thing can kill listen. I was gonna go another direction with this, which I still want to say because I am. We're talking to you about stuff, but like facts, like so when you think about like we did I did. I think I did A did an episode on her politics about the Mothership baby like that. Uh, the way that that black
people talk about space for future. Yeah, afro futurism, that like Funkadelic in Parliament, that is about aliens coming and it's because they coming to get us, and we for the party. You know what I'm saying, Like it's the baptized and the funk Baby, it's the Mothership. Like we're black people excited because we all obviously rooted in our experience on this planet. Is just like we okay, we don't belong here, Like this is y'all are this is weird.
And what's funny is like out of white culture when they talk about abduction, it's yass. You know what I'm saying, like that, y'all are afraid of the aliens because they gonna do experiments on you, which has more to do with the way for which white culture has treated the rest of the world. Like well that's what y'all did. Y'all found the other lands and colonized it and then made experiments on the local population. We don't come, We don't think like that.
I'm like, yeah, you show up and go party instead.
Yeah, they're coming to get us. Yeah, I'm say, like.
We going home. Yeah no, that makes a lot of sense. I hadn't thought about that and that yeah yeah, yeah. I love also that, Like I don't know, have you ever read Parable the Sower and Parable the Talents? Yes, yes, like I love that the thing that has taken Like those are two the most influential books are for people who haven't read them. Octavia Butler's kind of the most
prophetic science fiction authors probably ever lived. She was writing about basically Christian nationalists running for president on the platform of make America great again.
Like literally, yeah, she nailed it.
And yeah, this like idea of earth seed, the idea of like, oh no, we're going to get to space, and like coming from this like I don't know, it just makes me happy.
No, you're right, I'll Tavid Butler should be required reading for everyone. And plus.
Yeah, oh yeah, no, that's true. Yeah yeah. And also the best description of how the apocalypse is going to go, which is we think it's going to be like instant mad maxim. Instead it's gonna be slow and hard.
Yeah, like yeah, just as slow. You're just gonna look up and be like, oh, the Earth's dead.
Yeah, that's how I feel about how there's like no insects anymore, you know, like like the number of bugs that you killed driving across the country thirty years ago versus now, you know, oh my god.
Yeah, that goes back to the coffee episode. That's one of the one of the things I learned at one of the coffee farms was like, if your farm ain't got no insects, it is not organic, Like you can't you that. It means the soil is toxic. That's why there's no bugs.
Yeah, well that's the real spooky season thing to end on. Yeah, the h it's the fact that our world is getting real spooky. But anyway, thanks for listening to my stories. And if people want to hear more of what you do, how can they do that.
They can hear me on the Hood Politics with Prop podcast where we talk about unscary things like the twenty twenty four election and wars across the world. So there's that. There's you know, prop hip hop dot com. You can get some music and poetry and so working on some new poetry, which is kind of cool. Like, okay, so side note, not that I've ever really cared about the Grammys, but now there's like a category for spoken word albums. Oh really, and I'm like, I should do an album.
Yeah you should, you know what I mean.
I've always only done poetry on my rap albums. Like, so there's songs, there are poems, on the album I never did them. It was like, I think I want to do that next year.
Now you should do it. For the same reason that the Science Fiction Awards are divided into categories based on how long the story is. So there's like short story, novelette, novella, and novel. And the reason people write novelettes is because no one writes novelettes, so you have a better chance of winning the award.
You're reading my mind? Am I gonna? Am I gonna if this year? Am I gonna get Song of the Year?
No?
Kenjick Lamar is getting it for they not like us. You know what I'm saying. Are you gonna get Artists of the Year. No, Kendrick Lamar is gonna get it. No Jelly Roll is gonna get it. Like am I gonna get Album of the Year for rap? No, Kendrick Lamar is going know what I'm saying. So you're just like right, like you're not. I Am never going to win that category.
Yeah, but you do more spoken word than they do.
Yep.
Anyway, all right, well, happy spooky season and see you all next week when we bring you more cool people did cool stuff or weird things that I'm doing instead because I'm on tour. I don't know yet. You'll find out nice, all right job.
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