unwelcomeness

I read it and then look up at everyone’s personal expectant face-muscle arrangements, and I say What’s written here is some ass-kicking druidic or older unholy incantatory kind of instruction-list, probably, in a language strange to us, and it’s going to take a while, hanging with Bog Man, him slowly teaching us what these characters mean, etc., for us to understand it, but maybe it’s actually better if we never do, because who knows what kind of shit we’d be summoning if we were to learn how to pronounce this stuff. I look at Bog Man and he seems to be checked out, looking into the middle distance, in the direction of a tire store and an ampm.

Let’s see it, says Dwarf. I hand it over. His face gets confused, then solemn, then scared. He’s right, says Dwarf, handing it back to me, whereupon I shove it in my back pocket. Later we can examine, translate this, I say. The joke’s on them. On the piece of paper the Bog Man drew what looks like two stick-figures, one butt-fucking the other. Under this he’s written the words: DESERT LOVE.

We destroy some townspeople, burn their dwellings. We are like the Super Friends, but evil, and some of us stink, eat carrion, are dead, etc. For instance, Cranberry, so named because of his dark red complexion, is pretty much completely intolerable. He seems to be hanging with us for selfish reasons, or because he’s been told to by Dwarf’s dad, or like maybe because he expects to reap a lot of booty, like he thinks that it’s going to make him a better person or something. But it’s like, Hey, fucker, that’s a naïve expectation, because if you knew anything you’d know that the horrors of plundering are a double-edged sword, and those of us who are unlucky enough to destroy as a vocation lose our rosy outlook after the first five minutes. But no one says this to him because it’d be an admission of thinking about what he feels like in the first place, which would be uninteresting. There’s not much to plunder anyhow. Some Cherry Cokes, a cat, one lady had a couple of granola bars. Cats are edible but tricky to field-dress. We eat the granola bars and share the Cokes, since there’s five of us and only three Cokes.

Bog Man expresses zero interest in our granola bars and instead pokes his blackening fingers into a crusty pouch tied to his waist with a cord of braided leather, or hair. From this he fishes out what looks like a scrap of soggy tree fungus, which he holds with the tips of all his fingers, like the atoms are slippery and might disperse at any time. He tries to bite it but can’t, sticks it in his mouth hole, it falls out. He bends his neck in the direction of his lap but it only goes halfway, and makes alarming creaking sounds. I nod to Dwarf and he picks up the fungus and tears it up into tiny pieces and puts each into the Bog Man’s mouth one at a time, washing them down with Coke. The bog man’s neck is stretched out, his mouth pointing at the sky. At this point it’s hard to tell what’s really all that different about Bog Man and say, the mud he’s sitting in. The hazy air’s obviously deteriorating him.

“a viscous, pungent goo that burns the tongue and can affect other parts of the body”

Casu Marzu is an Italian hard cheese (Pecorino) which is purposefully inoculated with the larvae of the cheese fly, Piophila casei, which makes it soft and illegal. As is the case with Germany’s Milbenkäse, another cheese made with live arthropods (in this case cheese mites), either the authorities tend to look the other way, or there’s a healthy black market, or both. The maggots, which are eaten with the cheese, break down the cheese fats and speed ripening, giving it a runny quality and an extremely strong flavor. The issue of questionable legality comes in part from reports that the cheese can cause larval intestinal infections. Traditionally, it’s made during the hottest months of Summer. Skewers laced with rancid olive oil are used to pierce the cheese, which helps to attract the flies, and so on, until the cheese is transmogrified, and ready to eat, balancing on the edge between ripeness and putrefaction.

how to make it

The new Viking age is harsh. There is a blanket scarcity of implements, like an endless fog which hides useful stuff and corrodes it until obliviation. Most things have already been broken or lit on fire. But a lucky find is made: an intact garden bog with a few of what turn out to be potato plants. Some among us openly question the decision to linger; they are silenced with promises of withheld intoxicants, namely, the stolen pot. Besides, we need sustenance, who knows when we’ll be eating anything this good again. Our journey could last for weeks. We’ve got no map, and have to rely on luck and telepathic hints provided by occasional hiding Cthulhu Spawn. The fear in the eyes of our group is caused by ignorance of and hunger for a turn at being hardcore, a seasoned drug-and-survival fiend. Which few of us are. Mostly greenhorns, a ragged collection of fuckups thrown together by Scouting. With a couple of exceptions, including this correspondent, who reaches into the dirt and finds a healthy spud, which is a pleasant surprise. That the poisoned dirt could still find its way to being fertile is a fact which causes renewed solidarity in our group. We’ll all get potato discovery merit badges for sure. Spuds are cleaned and arranged in a line. If eaten raw, tubers such as the common potato are extra rich in vitamin C. I’ve saved us all from scurvy. You may thank me with blowjobs. Also the potato can be hollowed out to make a DIY smoking device, yes, no screen, don’t suck too hard. Demented dwarf produces a lighter, which he’s boosted from his dad’s lair: nice work, there’s hope for you after all. His mother claims telekinetic powers: if you’re alone in a room with her, she’ll tell you about it. She says if you think about it hard enough, you can move stuff with your brain waves. This is actually bullshit unless you are a sorcerer, but no one can determine for sure if she’s an actual sorcerer or just a wind bag. Dwarf’s older sister, who is oddly undeformed, can been seen showering and of course naked thru a hole which he’s made by enlarging a crack in some panelling. So it’s best not to really fuck with him all that much. Even so, after someone busts out a stolen flask of black-death peppermint schnapps, around my mouthful of uncooked potato I’m forced to verbally stop an effort to strip him naked and tie him to a dead tree with his own muddy leggings. The torture of Dwarf is stopped. A bog person walks up. In case you don’t know, a bog person is someone from the ancient past who was ritualistically murdered and pinned to the bottom of a bog with sharp sticks. The special acids found in bog water preserve these corpses, and depending on the strength of the solution, more or less of the carcass will travel forward through time to meet us. Sometimes all you find is a severed head, with long braids or chopped hair usually of a reddish-gold hue. This one has a gashed throat but the head’s still on, and from the remarkably preserved set of dick-plus-balls, exposed because of a lack of pants, we deduce that it’s a boy. Someone says, He wants a potato. No, he wants a hit. The bog man’s mouth is open but no sound emerges. I’m assuming his throat’s full of mud, but he disproves this by drinking most of the schnapps. We let him have it. By drawing with his soggy meat finger in the dirt he indicates that he’s three thousand years old, with a stick figure, an equals sign, and a number. Then he continues to divulge that he was killed for being a renegade druid sorcerer who scared the shit out of everyone else by being uncommonly powerful for his age, which, at the time of his death, was the same as ours. That’s cool, I say, we’re in touch with Cthulhu. With his empty slime sockets he looks us up and down, and I realize that to him, we all look the same. So I make us some name tags with a Sharpie and found cardboard. Mine says Tentmaster, Dwarf’s says Dwarf, others say things like Pingpong and Turd Burglar. For the bog man I make a blank sign, thinking that he’ll write whatever his own name is on it, maybe with decomposing flesh, but he brushes it away. He refuses to tell us his name, which stumps everyone but I guess out loud that his name’s a secret and If he told us then he’d lose his power or have to kill us all. Pingpong says that he’d have to do both. The bog man nods. This confirmed info sinks in for a moment and no one says much. Eventually we decide to team up. First things first. The bog man needs some maintenance: his femur’s become unsocketed, due to advanced decomposition of his hip area. I wire it up with an extension cord. Then it seems like he craves a nap, because he lays down in some grass and curls up in a fetal shape. Everyone is alarmed, because these days it’s hard to tell a sleeping person from a dead person, especially, we realize, if the person in question is an undead corpse. There’s no breath coming out, clearly, because he doesn’t breathe, so we can’t use that as an indicator. We have to sit around and wait.

Dwarf says, Last night I dreamed I was a dog, and the sky was full of Northern Lights, all over the sky. I was laying outside my dog house, just looking at the glowing sky, sort of appreciating the prettiness, and the color went out, and then I had to make cannoli with whatever I could find. So I got a bunch of swamp reeds and cut them up, then filled them with hamster food, beef jerky, loose gravel, whatever. I can’t remember what they tasted like, but it was hard to do all that stuff with dog paws instead of hands, and I was being judged on speediness, and something really important was the prize, or the punishment, whatever awaited me if I won or lost the race. I interrupt Dwarf and ask him to check on our comrades, most of whom, like the bog man, have decided to take naps, hopefully. Dwarf goes from one to the other, kicks them gently, and says they are all still alive. We share the last of the schnapps and smoke more pot. It’s really going to his head, and he leans over to puke, not getting up from where we are sitting. He says, I shouldn’t have eaten all those M&M’s. The potato pipe is getting burned, and the lighter’s almost out of butane. We need to find a water source, I say. Dwarf nods, in a daze. The bog man suddenly sits up, I guess rested, and indicates that he wants something to write with, a pen and paper. I wake everyone up and it turns out that Max, the one I’ve renamed Pingpong, has a little note pad, which I give to the bog man along with my sharpie. He takes twenty hours to write out his thoughts in the smallest letters possible, and we can tell that he’d be biting his tongue in concentration except that his jaws won’t close that far, and so his black tongue sort of sticks out a little further than it had already, and his lips sort of get more sphinctered. Then he hands the notebook to me.

The site was down last night, because I don’t know what it is that I’m doing. Obviously, it’s back, and the read an excerpt link works now, thanks to friendly anonymous support forum member who I think might be in Sweden.