Monday 28 December 2015

Children are Lovecraftian

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they enter the universe from outside it. They are an imposition of existence out of nothingness that was not and now is. I existed for twenty-seven years before my daughter was part of the universe. She will never, truly, comprehend that, because her universe began to exist only when she was born.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they manifest themselves within the flesh of an adult human and wrench their way bodily into the material plane in a nightmare day-long ritual of pain and gore. Have you even seen afterbirth? Google it. Tadah! Now you know how Shoggoths look. (Or DnD Black Puddings).

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are (at least to begin with) a profoundly abstract consciousness, a minimal, machinelike, binary dot of need or satiation. They comprehend nothing and experience everything in ways that adults have forgotten.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are vampires. Fucking vampires. They feed on your energy and love and use mindrays (and oxytocin) to enslave you. I am a ghoul now. I am a sleepless thing eating bugs and worms. I exist to serve the beast.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are a physical manifestation of deep time, and the knowledge you will be superceded and forgotten, and only through mimicry and memetic transfer can you hope to raise feeble dams against the onslaught of entropy that will drown the fortresses of man.

Sunday 27 December 2015

We took the "Make more meeples" action

Eleven months ago, on the train to Manchester, my girlfriend called me and told me she was pregnant. This was unexpected. I was travelling to Manchester for a two-day training workshop on public sector commissioning protocols as they applied to arts organisations, and to meet with a Mancunian theatre with a particularly excellent approach to youth engagement, and for another meeting with an artist-led company with a great reputation for participatory arts practise, and then a daylong meetup of the This +5 Sceptered Isle OSR community. I was not prepared to hear about our fecundity. I skipped out on the OSR meetup. Then (if you've done the maths you'll be way ahead on this one) about two months ago we had a baby.

I say "we". My girlfriend did most of the work. The terrifying, mind-shattering work. I'm surprised that more of the bible isn't about childbirth. Or the Iliad. Literature in general. The canon. Anyway, two weeks postpartum, as if to prove that she is a mad hard bastard who could put a Glaswegian longshoreman into a coma with just her outgoing personality, my girlfriend applied for and got her dream job. Now we're moving to York.

We have a baby, who I alternate between calling Bugglesnuff and Professor Wiggles, and we're moving to York, and I'm going to be a stay-at-home dad. It's all a bit new. All a bit... original. I suspect I might have a thing to write about.