I’m an average computer user. I’m not a geek but I don’t just use it for music downloads or
watching movies. I could correct my erectile dysfunction or enlarge my penis to satisfy any
woman. I could buy Viagra, Cialis, Prozac or Vicodin at really low prices! I could get in on the
ground floor and buy tomorrow’s hot stock today. I could look at pictures of Beautiful Young
Woman (all over 18). I could even make a tremendous fortune by assisting a political prisoner
in Nigeria. But I’m training my Spam filter to block out these rare opportunities. My security
software strips the viruses before they infest my computer and play havoc with my hard drive.
I have a tough firewall since some despicable hacker installed a root kit on my Linux box. I’m
the guy who wears suspenders and a belt. I have been vaccinated against all viral strains, old
and those yet to be disseminated. My safe has a combination lock and a deadbolt. Even I can't
get into it. I exaggerate, of course. My efforts to block solicitors aren’t perfect. I still get calls.
But I’ve discovered how to dispel Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Seventh-Day
Adventists, no mean feat since all three have congregations within a half-mile radius of my
house. Even my spellchecker thinks Adventists is not a word. Neither, apparently, is
spellchecker. Shouldn’t a spellchecker be a kind of über witch who corrects errors in the
enchantments of novices? I have a wireless alarm system and a Doberman. I have several
attack rosebushes, including an especially bloodthirsty eglantine that half-covers the roof and
fence as well as its own arbor. But I am neither a rock nor an island. I use standard
communication devices, have two phone lines (one business, one personal) and a cell phone, so
I can call from my cell. I go out, of course, to the yard and the garage and to run errands, which
I do in a Killer SUV that has a battering ram in front and strong armor in the rear. It’s
permanent 4-wheel drive with an extra low range in case I’m on a road with potholes, like
certain stretches of 101. I have a pair of lamassu modelled after those from Sargon II’s citadel
at Khorsabad. They wear Santa hats at Christmas, green hats for St. Patrick’s Day, bunny ears
for Easter, etc. Each one weighs 400 lbs. and is likely to stay put. Last week garden marauders
left a tomato plant on my porch. But people still want to clean my carpets, paint my house
number on the curb, sell me magazine subscriptions to magazines I’d never read. So it’s not like
I’m truly safe. The downspout gargoyles and gargoyle knocker are a bit off-putting, I’ll admit.
For a while I couldn’t keep maids for more than one visit. It’s not an ivory tower even though I
order books from Amazon.com to spite Barnes and Noble and Borders, who put my favorite
bookstore out of business. My cats keep me insane. They purr like furry Wankel engines. They
adore my Persian rugs, the best claw-sharpeners after expensive upholstery and antique
chairs. You are entering the delta of my stream of consciousness. I stood where no man goes,
and conquered demon foes. I’ve had epiphanies to rival those of any apostle. I have been
weighed in the balance and found wanting, because I don’t spend all my time petting the cats.
But Sekhmet is my goddess, the power of Re, the destroyer and drinker of blood, the healer
and drinker of beer. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons and remained unaffected, but the
Crossing at Wells Cathedral brings tears to my eyes. The bursting of bubbles blown by Pele, the
clouds of ash pulsing from the embrace of St. Helens, a square-rigger in the bay catching the
wind, make my nose tingle and my eyes water. But I have never succeeded at anything but
failure. If I sold my soul to the devil he’d ask for change. But, you know, I digress. I want to
assure you of my normality, my essential lack of imagination. I paint what I see. Look on these
works, ye mighty, and despair. I don’t want to come across as a wild-hared artist, like Bugs
Bunny in a parody of Paderewski. I don’t have a Poetry Voice. I’m not a devil-worshipper, no
Born Again anything. I don’t hug trees and I eat meat. I wear fur and leather so long as it’s not
endangered. I never read the Necronomicon, and the spellchecker doesn’t like that word one
little bit. I know how to manipulate the Tarot, so I don’t believe in it, even though the Lightning-
struck Tower turns up with great frequency for me. Palmistry is bogus, crystal balls are
generally made of glass because perfect quartz isn’t easy to find. I’ve been reading H.P.
Lovecraft since I was in Junior High, or Middle School, or whatever they call it now. A
distinction with no difference. I’d read Poe first, but I was also reading Carter’s full account of
Tutankhamun’s tomb. The spellchecker ought to OK Tutankhamun, but it doesn’t, even though
the Egyptians have pimped for him for generations. He never lived, you know. He was born a
mummy and stayed a mummy and that’s it. He never had a sheltered little life as a ruler
mightier than the world has ever seen. He never held out his hand and behold! The temple of
Karnak was built. He lived in a condo made of stone-a. No, he was always a mummy, he never
bedded the daughter of Nefertiti, it’s all made up. He was just a publicity stunt by the demented
priests of Amun. To speak of the dead is to make them live again. Tut’s immortality is
guaranteed, but I can’t pass judgement on his immorality, since he never had a chance at it. I
just want you to know that I’m not superstitious, don’t believe in ghosts, don’t follow the New-
old Religion. My mind is either so full or so empty that it has no room for those things.
Oddly, it wasn’t the spellchecker that warned me, but then my e-mail doesn’t show up in Word
Perfect XII. I may be wrong on the number, since Word Perfect has as many sequels as Rocky.
The spam blockers and the anti-viral programs didn’t grab it by the collar and throw it out. So
there it lurked in my inbox, with the subject line, “Cthulhu now knows you.” It was from
10tacles.com. I expanded the header and it all seemed legit, no connection to Nigerian scams
or hopping around off compromised computers. It wasn’t related to the First Bank of Phish or
scam.ebay.  I get messages from Chaosium all the time about the latest Call of Cthulhu book.
Entertainment Earth informs me of the latest releases of plush Nyarlathoteps. I know how to
write that in hieroglyphs. I haven’t read the Scroll of Thoth aloud and awoken Kares from his
bandaged slumber. Thoth had the Word from Re, but only Ptah had the power to act upon it.
But what did Cthulhu know? Here is this entity unbound by space and time, being and not
being, lying eternal but dreaming there in his Tweetie pajamas. Did he dream a little dream of
me? I don’t know. I stopped by Chaosium since it’s in Hayward, only ten miles away, tucked in
a nondescript office space. It was so nondescript I nearly missed it. The crew there had nothing
new to impart, they were delayed on the new T shirts and hoped they’d arrive soon. I bought an
Innsmouth T shirt just to be safe. There’s a lot of Deep Ones in my family. They come from
Massachusetts. The others in my family are riparian, living along the Hudson. Now I live near
the Bay. Dagon had recently made a new movie, but he wasn’t at Chaosium. Dark Carnival in
Claremont found no clues in their dangerously bulging shelves. Look out, she’s gonna blow!
And with a roar and a cloud of dust to rival St. Helens, the shelf experiences explosive
decompression and a raging flow of books crashes through the building, crushing everything
and everyone in its path. Gator Games, Games of Berkeley, denied all knowledge. Feeling like
Fox Mulder I went back to my computer, but not before enjoying injera at the Blue Nile. My
inbox was coyly silent regarding Old Squid Face. Maybe it was a one-off, never-to-be-repeated
offer and the limited supply was already gone. But not so! Two days later came another
message “and he knows where you live”. That’s not easy. My mailing address is at the UPS
Store and I don’t give my home address out very often. Perhaps he suborned a clerk at PG&E
or AT&T. I’m certain it was a real, physical person doing this, not a ghost in the machine or
even a deus ex machina. Someone who could type on a keyboard (or use voice recognition
software) and shopped at Fry’s. Maybe it was one of the regulars that hang around there, the
geeks who are more knowledgeable than the sales staff.  10tacles is a clever name. Maybe it was
the Monterey Bay Aquarium trying to interest me in supporting a new cephalopod exhibition.
After all, I’d given them money for sharks and jellyfish. Foot heads, foot heads, roly poly foot
heads, eat ‘em up, yum! There’s a Ray Troll poster, Night of the Ammonites. Ammonites are a
Jurassic type fossil. Belemnoids or belemnites, usually seen as shiny black and strangely
patterned cones, are Cretaceous type fossils. Belemnites are just straightened-out ammonites.
Then the message came, “he’s been following your Land Rover.” Now, my Land Rover goes
nowhere without me, at least as far as I know. The inescapable conclusion is that 10tacles has
been stalking me. The image of a giant squid, think 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Kirk
Douglas, slurping and squirming its way down Fremont Blvd., is fascinating and I let it fascinate
me a while before shrugging my shoulders and incidentally popping my neck and going off to
work on edentata. Was the Garden of Eden full of Edentata? Did the First Family wear
dentures? Alas, questions that must remain unanswered, but not beyond the realm of all
conjecture. Now logically you’d expect the next message to be “and he’s at your front door”,
but that only happens in horror movies. Instead, it was “no more magazines.” That can hardly
be bad. Kids that come around selling stuff to “keep them off the streets”, one of the great
oxymorons, almost as good as George Bush. I sighed. The garage band down the street, which I
always call the Wild Stalyuns after Bill and Ted, practices every afternoon and into the early
evening. In the past eight years they haven’t improved much. They’ll never be as good as
Spinal Tap but at least their amp doesn’t reach 11. Mine does, and it’s got 5 Klipsches to back it
up, including a pair of La Scalas, the big theatre speakers that I got at a closeout sale at the late
lamented Good Guys. It’s always good for retaliation when I put on Paranoid or the Scorps.
The Great Gates of Kiev will blow away a row of houses, so I use these weapons sparingly. But
the Stalyuns were at it, and, smiling, I slipped Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath into the cd deck and
turned up the dials and opened the windows. There’s a cone of silence in my house, one area
where the acoustics are so rotten there is almost no sound. The critters and I retreated there
for a few minutes until it was safe to turn off the stereo. I’m old fashioned, I say things like
“stereo” even if it’s a misnomer when applied to the equipment. The Stalyuns had fallen silent
and the baying hound down the street was quiet. I know I’d also shut up a few screaming
children and maybe the jerks doing donuts in the cul-de-sacs. I realized I’d been avoiding my
computer and I had over a days’ worth of mail. 10tacles was there again. I had a typo there, and
the spellchecker thinks “agin” is a word. Maybe it was programmed in West Virginia. “He likes
you,” 10tacles informed me. It was a longer message and continued, “you are one of his. He
watches you. He waits.” No, 10tacles is a stalker. He’s out there, waiting his chance, but I don’t
have any fences or tall hedges to provide hiding spaces. The Japanese rock garden is an ankle-
twisting obstacle course. I know this, I broke my kneecap on the cobbles a few years ago. But
calamari doesn’t have much in the way of knees. Or ankles, come to that. Beware of the Blob. I
never saw the movie, but I heard the song. I always liked The Eggplant that ate Chicago better.
The plush catfish on my computer is twitching its barbels. Maybe there was an earthquake, just
the Great Catfish shrugging and transmitting his shrug to this surrogate minion. So, is “he”
Cthulhu? I didn’t think Cthulhu liked anybody, that you’d have to be extraordinarily stupid to
think he’d lift a sucker to help you. That’s the thing about this pantheon. The entities, since
they’re not all gods, are forces of mindless destruction, the blind mad god Azathoth, the
Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep, the bubble-brained Yog Sothoth, who is both the gate and the
key to the gate. Are you the Gatekeeper? No, I’m the Key Master.  Forces of an indifferent
cosmic nature, harnessing the dark power of wind and water, fire and earth. Ïa! Shub-
niggurath! He couldn’t get away with that name if he wrote in this era of political stupidity. All
hail Eris! All hail Discordia! They’re coming to take me away, ha ha! Who wants flies when I
can have a nice, fat spider? Two games of Mah Jongg and checking for disasters and I can
forget that I have a Secret Pal out there. Dholes don’t cause earthquakes. They’re dogs in India.
The rising of Rl’yeh doesn’t create tsunamis. It’s all plate tectonics, folks! All hail Hess and
Hazen! All hail Wegener! The good ol’ Mythos never really deals with volcanoes, but the
wendigo can account for a lot! The Eastern Seaboard is mostly flat as the proverbial, no
wonder storm surges are so devastating! What’s next? “He thinks you’re cute?” “Are you busy
tonight?” “What’s your sign?” “What’s your major?” “What’s a nice ... “ I never do this. I never
let it take over because that’s the road to madness, the highway to hell, cruising down I-5 in a
Porsche with a broken speedometer. Broke the land speed record that day! To hell with
Bonneville! It’s like the garbage brain taking a memory dump. I never should have right-
clicked that icon. I should have gone about my edentate business and my postal duties.
Reminds me of going postal, but what could I do with a pirate cutlass and a dull tachi? The
claymore requires 2 hands, and I’ve got rotator cuff problems. Ah! I have two rock hammers! I’
ll run amok in a china shop! Partly it’s dealing with the phone company. That always skews the
balance. Imagine a balance beam with a kink in the middle. Kinky. Lola, my Lola. No, I’d better
read the message, it’s safer.
“The stars are about right, given calculations of the precession of the equinoxes and the time of
the year, being in the Northern Hemisphere.” Now if that isn’t the stuff of horror, I don’t know
what is! And I do know. True horror is “One train leaves the station at 10 am ...” or an endless
loop of Achy Breaky Heart. Heh heh. “Breaky” has been rejected by the spellchecker! And you’
d think they’d like Garth Brooks in West Virginia. I’d better run the orders through the credit
card machine, unless it’s modem-erroring again. The Help Desk managed to lock up the
machine last time until I used the Dread Curse of Azathoth and she found me a supervisor who
straightened it out. Did you know that it’s been proposed that volcanoes are strange
attractors?  They can’t be stranger than Cthulhu. At least I think it’s still Cthulhu. I’ve been
assuming 10tacles is his mouthpiece, as it were, and not Bill Nighy in a squid suit. Billy Bones,
Billy Bones... yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me! It’s not a real ego booster, being attractive to a
monstrous cuttlefish. Let me take you in my arms ... Hold me, hold me, take me in your arms...
It is of arms and the man I sing. A Farewell to Arms. Armored catfish. Depleted uranium armor.
Armor Hot Dogs. I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener. You know, that has sexual overtones?
After all, the Dickmobile is just a repainted Wienermobile. I saw the Wienermobile just off
Zocodober in Toledo. The place where El Greco walked and scholars debated. They probably
used Bimbo buns for the hot dogs. Viva España! The difference between myself and a madman
is that I am not mad. I fell asleep reading about the precession of the equinoxes and the transit
of Venus. You know, I misspelled wiener every time and the spellchecker didn’t catch it! Sic
transit gloria mundi. Sic and transit are OK, but gloria mundi is right out. I wonder if Cthulhu is
hitting on me.
I dared look at mail again. There are two messages because I didn’t look yesterday. Now they’
re all saying “Re .... “ and I have to open them to see what they say. How can you see what
someone says? See what I’m saying? The first one says, “Do you enjoy spas?” and the second
one says, “Do you drink red wine?” Now I know 10tacles is hitting on me, and I should stop this
right now before he starts getting obscene and then I’ll never be able to stop reading.  There
was no modem error, everything is fine, we’re all fine here. Now I must contend with the Click
‘n Ship from the Post Office. Then I’ll have to wrap a guinea pig, a vulture, 2 pairs of earrings
and a Green Woman. We sell a lot of vultures. Hardly anybody sells vultures. I told the rep I
have customers waiting for hyenas, and she was surprised. I’d wait for a hyena. Anything with
teeth like that, I’ll let him go first. They’re not bad, just misunderstood. You know, like sharks.
And I alone survived to tell the tale. But you can’t call me Ishmael, I won’t allow it! I haven’t
done a bloody thing today. Something’s in my head but it’s not me. Oddly, today’s message is
“See you on the Dark Side of the Moon.” Cool! Cthulhu likes Pink Floyd! Maybe he watches
Monty Python, too. I liked Moby Dick, too. I wonder what Cthulhu thinks about Sean
Connery? I saw the total eclipse of the sun when I was on Cape Cod, the one Mick Jagger flew
his Learjet to Nova Scotia for. And I saw an eclipse of the moon over the Funeral Mountains.
The moon was huge. You could see all the maria and mountains. You couldn’t see the flag,
though, or the footprints. But it went dark and that made Hale-Bopp over the Panamint Range
really stand out. Geology can be your friend. Seeing the bright moonlight sparkle off the huge
orthoclase crystals in the granitic plutons in the White-Inyo Mountains. That’s an experience.
You can almost read by starlight at ten thousand feet. You also tan through SPF 30. I know this
has to go somewhere, there has to be a denoument, a cutting of the plot’s Gordian Knot to
reveal the horrific end. The part where the screen goes dark and the mouse doesn’t work and
the Blue Screen of Death pops up. But not here. It can’t end here. There’s another message.
Cthulhu Now Knows