Private Thoughts Of An Evil Evil Clown At Work

Litotes the Clown Journal Entry 2005-01-05

This morning Vile the Live Evil Clown (names are changed to protect the innocent / dead / consumed), in the freak show I call my life, mentioned ‘Dark Matter’ (see below) casually, was it a slip? He didn’t seem to realize that he said it. It was hard to tell. I didn’t want to look too closely or seem to look like I was looking too closely.

A little later Vile said ‘Cthulhu works through compression.’ Another slip? Or is he trying to judge my reaction? Ascertain my loyalties?

I kept my face blandly neutral and pretended I hadn’t heard. He watched me closely as he continued to talk about bandwidth, multimedia, etc. His attention was like a palpable radar. A physical force. Pinging me through the suddenly thick atmosphere.

In a war between vicious factions, it is sometimes best to seem to be too stupid to know what’s going on, to be ‘asleep’. To be a Clown. Sometimes the disguise is too perfect and while pretending to slumber – I sleep.

What happens to the Clown who can no longer tell where or when the dream begins?

I don’t know which side he is on, I must remain guarded and neutral. In a way it doesn’t matter – that he is in the game anyway is bad enough.

I hate this.

I must find a way; through the fog.

It’s like wonder being violated by a sense of fear and evil. Fear is by far the oldest and strongest of our emotions. Some believe that our biggest fear is of the unknown.

They are mistaken.

Our biggest fear is unutterable, even to ourselves. It is inevitably bound up with fascination and wonder. It is, in part, a machine in which collective insanity incinerates itself as a protective instinct.

It is a spectral tragedy spilling out of the mouth of madness. It is not the unknown – it is the unknowable.

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Dark Matter

Material that is believed to make up (along with dark energy) more than 90% of the mass of the universe but is not readily visible because it neither emits nor reflects electromagnetic radiation, such as light or radio signals. Its existence would explain gravitational anomalies seen in the motion and distribution of galaxies. Dark matter can be detected only indirectly, e.g., through the bending of light rays from distant stars by its gravity.

Cthulhu

'In His House at R'lyeh Dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, yet He shall rise and His kingdom shall cover the Earth.'

Cuthulhu is the chief deity of a secret cult (www.cultofcthulhu.net). The cult often masquerades itself as a hoax, a joke or fictitious religion. Though its seemingly harmless horror mythos of books, games and other culture products it seduces, corrupts and recruits new members.

Or put another way… A hoax that is presented as a hoax, that presents itself as a hoax, is no longer a hoax, but while an actual hoax is not presented as a hoax, neither is a work of fiction presented as a hoax -- but in the latter case this precondition for the hoax prevents it from functioning as a hoax. But then the "care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax" may create the suspicion in the reader that the tale is a fictionalized version of real events, and in effect an inverse hoax presenting reality as fiction rather than the other way around.

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It would be as useless to perceive how things "actually look" as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.

- M. Minsky, 1988. The Society of Mind. Simon & Schuster.

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