Tha’s mine photostream

Well, I think I cut the pattern okay.  May have overjudged the (my) size.  The damn thing looks like a tent so far.  I understand I need to gather the front a little (I can’t believe I just typed that out) but seriously, I look like I’m getting ready to set sail.  On these long stretches of seams you burn through thread like nobody’s business, too.  I needed to replace the bobbin like 3 times.  I admit I have a lotta stitches per inch.

The pattern suggests that everything be sewn by hand.  I tell you, Ms. Kannik (the fine proprietor of said pattern) is a sewing-crazed wanton.  If I tried to so much as hem this thing by hand I would needs must curl up in a balle and die!  Odds Bodkins! Hammer and Tongs!

Well, don’t sew drunk kids.  Bad news.  Bad news.  Ima need to go get some more muslin to cut out the body pieces.  I don’t trust my newcastle-laced stitchings.  A pun.  Beer and sewing.  You see?

Why?  Well, hear me out.  And bear in mind I live in Mennonite country (this seems an odd thing to write, upon reflection).  In the last couple of books there was a subplot that’s been developed into the central theme of this latest one.  Sort of a “fight the future” type arc that’s been hung there like he was staring at it and thinking real hard or something.  This thing about nice clothes.  You may have picked it up in the earlier books; the Rickson’s bomber jackets, bad reactions to logos.  Now he’s got this “plot device” of the post hoc militarization of civilian wardrobes.  Kinda scary; also perfectly true.  If you think his premise is a bad one, go check out my local Walmart where camo shorts in widely varying patterns are all the rage.  You see, the styles of the armed forces have like a 10 year curve into mass appeal and now we have things like neck ties because some dickhead Prussian officer had to keep the gravy off his placket.  (Bear in mind, I’m hungry as I write).  Long story short, in the book the end product of development is the anti-Old Navy “anti-label” Gabriel Hounds.

Anyway, thanks to Gibson I am reacting badly to mass-produced clothes.  Once you learn a little, you might be horrified at the shortcuts and shoddy workmanship that sweatshops gotta make so’s you can have a $12 pair of khakis.  That’s leaving all the “sweat” aside…  I was wondering why my pants have holes in all the seats… Well, it’s cause I settled for cheap shit.  And I got a closet full of cheap shit I don’t particularly like to wear.  Why?  Always hunting for something that looks good on me/always buying cheap shit/too invested to move on and throw that stuff into the Goodwill pile.

Uninformed purchasing of disposable goods.  Possibly the greatest problem in the modern western world.

The only thing I own that I really dig is my leatherjacket, and my biker boots from 17 years ago.  And my red chuck taylors.  But I’m growing up and I’m a professional and you can’t wear that shit forever.  So I’m gonna take my mother-in-law’s sewing machine and build me some clothes that look good on me and that will last for a long time and that are comfortable.  And fuck belts.  I don’t like belts.  I do like vests (or rather ”waistcoats”).  So I guess I should have suspenders.  Well, in short, I’m learning how to sew so that I can make sharp clothes that will last me the rest of my f’ing life and survive the zombiepocalypse.  Sort of a throwback to the old days when you’d have one suit for business, and a couple of stoutly-built and comfortable tailored shirts, and like a minimum gentleman’s wardrobe that could be carried around in a trunk rather than a truck.

Well, Gibson can start a thing that’s sucked us all in; hopefully this reactionary movement will spit us all out cleaner and more clothes-aware types in, say, 30 years.  By then we’ll have the chips in our skulls to learn tailoring fast, and we’ll use them to make neoprene double-breasted frock-coats to accommodate our swims to and from work.

I’ll fill you in on the details as they arrive.  Actually, I cut the pattern for the vest tomorrow, probably.  I’ll have the muslin made up this week, I should think.

I heartily recommend to you the site http://hppodcraft.com/.  Why, on the way into town today to get material for my next DIY project I happened to listen to their rendition of “The Picture in The House”, a story I first encountered in the Coral Gables Senior High library back in the early 90′s.  After nearly 20 years and untold re-readings, I sort of look at it as the quaintest of Lovecraft’s works.  But this podcast version… It’s scary.  You should put it on your headphones, or your stereo surround systems, or your Mythophonic Mi-Go Rendition Cannister, turn OFF the lights, and wait for the end.  It’s perfect!  I almost peed myself a little driving in broad daylight with the top down.  Even though I knew full well the ending that awaited.

Seriously, a bravura performance by Andrew Leman and effects work by some unnameable master.  The rise of teh interwebs means great things for people fond of “radio” drama, and also the Cthulhu Mythos.  Do yourself a mindblasting favor and check it out.  1d10/1d20 SAN

The other point that led me to post is that I have noticed some seriously creepy ramshackle… shacks around here.  I have mentioned them before, and this particular story by Lovecraft uses them to wonderful effect.  I am inspired to hop on the bike and submit a few pictures of the nearest ones.  We call the closest one “The House on the Troll Road”.  You might imagine why… but maybe I’ll post a few photos so you don’t need to.

Anyways, enjoy spring and uh, Tallyho!

So I write off the notion that I moved out here to get away from people – my job requires that I dig interacting with people of all sorts.  Good people, and also the bad sorts that naturally gravitate to cities.  Also the bad sort that commits unspeakable acts in the countryside.  Bad deeds, it seems to me, happen everywhere.  Small towns, cultural centers, legislative hubs.  Bad Things go wherever people settle down for awhile.

For example, I am struck by some of the pernicious and foul acts that pop up every now and then in the charming little –burbs and –burgs and –villes that dot Maryland all smallpox-like.  Hog Maw, for instance.  It’s one of those things that proves that folks out in the boonies and left to their own devices will literally and figuratively cook up the weirdest shit.  Hog Maw, if you are unacquainted, is a charming concoction of pig stomach, pork, cabbage, and potatoes.  The stomach being stuffed with the other stuff, all roasted in an oven.  Offered as a ‘special’ every now-and-again in diners and breakfast joints that teem on the corners of aforesaid poxy towns ‘round these parts.  Tradition apparently drives the cooks that make it to roast it until crispy and leathery in mouth-feel, bland but nevertheless satisfying for some familiar but un-remembered reason.  And it’s curiously out of place amongst the Reubens and Cheese-steaks and Calzones and Chinese buffets that are so relatively common out here.  And it’s also certainly a thing brought from afar by the Stoic Germans and Dutch that fled the Oppressors on the Continent to raise pigs in the sticks of the New World.  Whatever corrupt seasonal rituals that led to Hog Maw must, to my mind, be somehow related to the Snallygaster that also flitters about in this neck of the woods.

What is a Snallygaster?  Not a food; in fact, the antithesis of food.  It’s a tradition that eats instead of is eaten by the good farming people here.  The Snallygaster, or schnell geister, is a Germanic “quick ghost” that swoops about in the woods and hills very near to where I live and makes off every so often with a child, or a horse, or a slave that no one will notice.  Some who have seen its bat-like wings, metallic beak, and tentacled head – and then lived to tell the story – have said that it feeds on the blood of its hapless victims.  Usually the victims were no one of any import who might be missed.  Predictable as clockwork, local community leaders cobble together some outcry that quickly degenerates into a wink-and-nod joke.  And, if I get my calculations about right, we are due for a rash of sightings and gobblings very soon in these foothills.  One might say, if they were inclined, that The Stars Are Nearly Right.  The cycle is about 40 years long.

Back in the early 20^th century in Frederick County, they managed to inveigle the Smithsonian Institute and a President of the United States – Teddy Roosevelt, if you’re curious – who promised to make things better “if you can hold out long enough”.  But just as soon as the hew and cry of the mob began, and the people began to paint the seven-pointed stars that would keep the Thing at bay on their ramshackle barns, the Snallygaster settled back down and slept out the fuss.  They set down the pitchforks and torches and got back to the work at hand.  Sly mothers took  the opportunity, as they had for hundreds of years before, to threaten wayward children with the Snallygaster for horseplay after dark and wandering away where Children Should Not Go.  A deathless, timeless, demon relegated to a vague threat against high-spirited farm boys and their lusty milkmaid neighbors.  The shame of it defies further consideration! Before the paint was dry on their hands, the field hands forgot and got back to devouring pig stomachs and the virtue of dairy farmers’ daughters.  And things got sleepy and predictable before too long, and stayed that way for another couple of decades.

Why do I dwell on the lonely and misunderstood Snallygaster?  Well, I have faith in him.  It.  Not as a monster, but rather as a wonderful teaching tool about people.  We like to hearken back to the days of yore when things were weird and exciting, and we don’t feel the terror that we have a perfect right to still feel.  Heck, my sister-in-law distinctly remembers that as late as the 1970s, she herself was threatened with this sinister critter by her grandmother.  Looking back, she knows it was foolish, but… But when the wind howls across the hill, and the madwoman nighttime cries of foxes keen through the valley, and the stars shimmer above in their infinite menace…  Well, it’s not so easy, then, to forget.  In fact, that barn across the way that needs a little work might then seem like a perfect place for a winged thing to perch after its nightly rushings-about.  One might say that the stars are right, at that time, for a good barn-painting, and maybe to top it off you could embellish the job with a little with a seven-pointed star, just to be on the safe side.  Why?  Well, Grandpa had his reasons for everything, strange as they seem now.

And then afterwards, maybe you could get over to Union Bridge and sample the local diner’s – the Buttersburg Inn’s – you could try their Hog Maw and the horrible things your forebears brought with them (and thought they left behind) might be placated with a little roasted potato and cabbage, all stuffed in the innards of a pig.  And you could forget that terror that dwells near here, and go to bed on a full stomach and not worry so much about the howls in the night and missing people and those vast and hideous skies that loom above your barn out back.  The one that ought to have been torn down a long time ago if only you had the time and energy.

People out here in the country, like people everywhere I suppose, are weird.