Mommy Blogging in Lovecraft’s Neighborhood

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From our very special guest blogger, Heather N’ylahrath. 

 

Living in New England, it’s no surprise we get snow. I just love bundling up the kids so that all I can see are little noses and eyes peeking out of the hand knit artisanal lamb’s wool scarf and hat sets I made them last spring. No use letting the wool of that little guy we sacrificed go to waste! I like to think The Old Ones would approve of our farm to altar, head-to-tail sacrificing. Some of the other families in the congregation just let the sacrificial beast lay on the altar, but I know these little knit booties and hat would be Cthulhu approved.

All set to play in the snow!

 

Impending snow always presents us with the question of what to do with the kids! I’m planning on taking the twins out for a day of fun. I really want them to see the real fury of winter so they can feel the lurking presence of The Deep Ones with each howl of the wind. They so rarely get to hear from their grandparents in the deep, so it’ll be nice to chat.

When we’re done shouting lamentations into the wind damning the hotel project on Pavilion Beach, I think we’re going to head inside for some nice hot cocoa and a story. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the last pints of hand milked, organic, humanely raised, artisanal heavy cream before the storm, and it’s going to make this artisanal hand blended hot cocoa mix even better.

darkness

Our afternoon story

 

You know, we really are blessed to live in a place with such a history, surrounded by the dense looming fog rising from the sea. I tell the kids that it’s their grandparents and ancestors sending greetings from the Deep. Sometimes, we find special things on the beach, like little tokens with their initials and tiny carved fetishes, and I love knowing that our family is watching over us from Below. It really makes you think!

 

wtf

Grandma

Well, I have to run. The twins are begging me to take them out to play, and I can’t wait to spend the time out with them, but first, we have to unlock the basement and throw down dinner for their father….Because Gloucester!

Counterpoint: I welcome the snowy apocalyapse

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The Clam is excited to bring you differing views on topics of import. For instance, earlier this week we discussed each of our opinions on the viewership of professional football in light of the recent controversies regarding the NFL and revelations of head injury among even junior players of the sport. Yesterday, KT Toomey, tired of the recent unprecedented snowfall and the numerous difficulties in managing its myriad negative effects, opined that Gloucester would be better off in a tropical location. Jim Dowd provides a counterpoint in today’s entry.

Though my colleague may be a wise and intuitive person, in this case I must stand up and should “I disagree!” I, for one, welcome the time of The Great Wolves and the cleansing of the Earth. The old gods must die. All must perish.

 

ragna

 

With these past few snows, it has become increasingly clear that Ragnarok is upon us. Soon, we shall hear the crowing of the three roosters. We shall not bother to flee by using bandsaws to float away, for it will only prolong the inevitable death we all so richly deserve. We will turn on our fellow man, and there will be none spared, as the rivers shall run red with the blood of our brothers. Do not beg for mercy, for there will be none when Skoll and Hatt devour the sun and moon and the walls of Asgard fall. The great serpent will rise from the sea, and the sky shall split in two . You will be cold no more when the fire giant sets the world alight.

Ragnarök_by_Doepler

 

All your cares of snowbanks, walkways, plowed-in cars and jackholes parking in the Market Basket fire lane because they don’t want to tread through the slushy lot shall seem as nothing when the sky goes black and the shards of the firmament itself fall onto the earth, piercing all living things like spears. The wailing and gnashing of teeth is far better than Costa Rica’s rampant socialism and impressive literacy rate.

From this day forward, nothing but pain shall fall from the skies above. First a torrent of snow, then a hail of ice, then stones, fire and finally water shall cover all. All of your kitschy hipster wall art will be gone, along with everything and everyone you’ve ever known or loved. Even Mick Jagger. There will be a thousand years of stillness. However there will be no giant spiders.

But new gods rise. They shall bring forth life from seed, and the world shall again know green. Two survivors, who survive by consuming the morning dew, shall bear forth many generations and again repopulate our world. We will have a new, beautiful sun that shall shine down on our fresh green and blue world.

But we shall know none of this future, for we are doomed. Our fate has already been decided. There is no hope.

Jim Dowd is a motivational speaker who lives in Gloucester. His first book, “The Thundering Cataclysm: Let Me Explain How We’re All Gonna Die” is in stores now. 

 

 

In Which I Propose We Somehow Float Gloucester Slowly Towards Costa Rica

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Okay, this snow is officially bullshit.

It was kind of a little fun and quaint last week for like ten minutes before the snow got in our preschooler’s mittens and he started wailing and then his snot froze to his cheek and then it was not fun anymore for anyone.

But then it happened again with the damn snow. Before we really even got a chance to deal with it. And now it’s like seven billion tons of snow and we definitely can’t deal with it now. And now we’re due to get even MORE snow? Are you SHITTING me? It already looked like my street had a terrible cocaine problem, now it’s just ludicrous.

Oh look, how cute and Rockwellian!

Oh look, how cute and Rockwellian!

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Oh hell to the NO.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can’t deal with this cold white scourge. I bet you can’t, either. Remember the summer? Man the summer was rad as heck. Sure it gets a little hot once in awhile, but that’s when we jump in the ocean.

Anyway Gloucester’s a total mess now, despite the herculean effort our DPW has been making to clean up. I have officially abandoned 2 of our 3 vehicles now, and our neighbors are sharing our tiny driveway because they’ve got nowhere to go, all the street parking is gone. I’m literally running the whole family around in a 2WD, 13 year old Nissan XTerra with 205k miles on it, all-season tires (damnit) and an alternator that I can best describe as “sketchy.” My 6′ fence that keeps my annoyingly barky hound dog firmly in my yard is starting to disappear – the snow was plowed right up and over and apparently now he can waltz right over the fence and run around barking which I learned the hard way this afternoon.

I cannot deal with more snow days, either. My kids have been home for 4 days. We have played all the Mario Kart we can play (even Rainbow Road ugh), and we have LEGO’d for too hard and too long. We have nerf gun bruises and our DVR has nothing new on it. Every single glove, hat, and scarf is sopping. We can’t take much more.

I have our only solution:

We hack the island off from the mainland with a bunch of band saws and slowly row our way south.

I know, that probably sounds like crazy talk. But I talked to a guy who says his brother’s girlfriend is like totally a geologist and he told me that this plan is totes foolproof. Couple dozen band saws and a weekend’s worth of work and we’re floating down the coast. Then we just gotta get some people to row, maybe use my neighbor’s 20HP Evinrude to save some time.  We tie the greasy pole behind us with a heavy rope, wave goodbye to West Gloucester and everything up the line and motor southward.

CR-BEACH

 

PROS:

– Uh, it’s warmer and we won’t have snow, duh.

– Still have tourism economy and probably fishing but more the kind with long boats and spears of some type.

– We can teach the locals onshore how to make seven different kinds of greasy pizza.

– Health care!

– A 95.1% literacy rate.

CONS

– Giant Motherfucking Spiders

– It becomes really expensive to call people you still kinda have to care about but I mean there’s Skype.

– A lot of people’s bosses really mad about the increased commute time to Danvers.

As you can see, CLEARLY the benefits outweigh the downsides of such a move. So join me, Gloucester, and we shall demand this plan be set forth posthaste.

Before the next frickin’ storm. Please.

 

 

Why I didn’t watch the Superbowl

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A lot of terrible things happened in 1968. There was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and the My Lai massacre to name just a couple, but there was at least one amazing positive thing: Outside some legion hall in Nashua New Hampshire the Republican candidate for president, a certain Richard Milhous Nixon was about to spend an hour in his limo riding up to Manchester. He was tired, it was late and he just wanted to talk about football during the ride, nothing else. Apparently he loved talking football and none of the hyper-intellectual ivy leaguers in the press corps were even remotely versed enough to engage him save one guy, Hunter S. Thompson.

Did they search him before letting him in the car?

Did they search him before letting him in the car?

So they shared the limo up to the airport chatting about the great game the whole way, having a fine time. They even shook hands as then-candidate Nixon stepped up the stairs into the Lear jet and Thompson flicked his cigarette causing a panic because it landed close to the fueling equipment.

These guys were mortal enemies. Thompson considered Nixon a monster “Straight out of Grendel” and the whole reason he even got into writing about politics was to fight him. On the other side, Nixon stood as a bulwark against the counterculture, drugs, anti-Vietnam, and his path to the presidency was through activating the “silent majority” of American voters who opposed what the good doctor represented. But these two guys shared a passion for professional football and on this they connected. Football has the power to do that, to cross bridges and boundaries. It’s the one thing we share between the classes, the races and the states.

And I hate the NFL for fucking that up.

If I was NFL commissioner Roger Goodell looking at the numbers from Sunday I’d be thinking to myself, “I wonder what it would really take for our ratings to actually drop? Finding out we trade in illegally harvested human organs from kidnapped orphans?” Think about it, you have a game damaging the brains of the guys who play it, you have domestic abuse ignored at the highest level and you have corporate practices that can best be described as “crony socialism” more reminiscent of how businesses are structured in China than any Western purportedly capitalist democracy, And yet the consumer knowing this is pretty much saying, “Yeah, whelp, you know. It’s a beautiful fucking game is all…”

Roger Godell is the real winner Sunday Night.

Wait till they find out the turf is actually made of kitten fur

Next year I’m wearing a suit made out of live kittens because who’s gonna stop me?

Personally, I got to a point with football where I was starting to feel shitty watching games. The video of Ray Rice beating his girlfriend, every new revelation about head injury and the notably non-neurologist denialists who feel the need to butt-in with dumb arguments like “soccer produces concussions too!” without any seeming understanding of the magnitude of the problem borne out by the statistics. The team representing our capital is still named after an ethnic slur, for fuck’s sake. It just seemed like a constant parade of yet another dude arrested for murder followed by another suicide then another sexual assault at a college or a high school. Allowing myself to keep a connection to football was demanding increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics.

So it was time to employ one of my favorite pieces of neural equipment: The Cognitive Dissonator™. This is the mental device that makes it possible for us to do specific things even though we kinda sorta know we shouldn’t. It’s what allows me to write this on a computer that was probably assembled by child slaves, eat a BLT that likely came from a factory farm and run my car on fuel pumped out of the ground by one of the most repressive regimes on Earth, a place where they behead people for “witchcraft”.  I imagine that mine looks something like this:

It's also great for holidays family gatherings

It’s also great for holidays and family gatherings

It’s essential to have because we all live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance around a number of topics. We are all hypocrites, it’s an essential part of being human. As Physicist Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” (Quantum physicists have hyper-developed dissonators, by the way. Manufactured in Copenhagen.)

So employing this device allowed me to live for a while in the dual-reality state of recognizing football for both sides of its coin.

We're entertained just fine, thanks for asking.

We’re entertained just fine, thanks for asking.

But sometime this Spring I found myself having to employ an additional industrial strength dissonator just to keep up with football and the load it was putting on my coping systems.

These are the ones they issue to people working on tobacco accounts at advertising agencies

These are the ones they issue to people working on tobacco accounts at advertising agencies

Still the load was too great. Everything from Sandusky to Stubenvile. From OJ to JoPa. Rice. Peterson. Hernandez. Finding out that the NFL hasn’t paid any taxes since 1966 and that cities use tax free bonds usually reserved for schools and roads to build stadiums for them. Hearing NFL has been running a junk science campaign on CTE and now we learn even high schoolers are being hit hard and repeatedly enough to bring it on. Cheerleaders are treated shamefully. My own high school and the toxic football mania, the quarterback for the Jets ran a dogfighting ring…my dissonator started smoking. It got very warm. There was a noise.

And it just stopped.

Without the protection of cognitive dissonance I found myself having to ask “What would these guys have to do to finally make me stop watching football?” I found that the answer was the steady stream of things they’d already done and continued to do and showed no signs of not doing in the future. I had to cop to the fact that by watching in spite of it all,  I’m giving my tacit approval. The only power I have is to not watch.

So now I’m that guy. I’m the guy who won’t watch football. I can’t say that I like being this particular guy. I enjoyed the pageantry and camaraderie. I loved participating in a thing that could bring even Nixon and Thompson together. So much of our culture, so much great writing, so much hanging with buds and drinking suds. I don’t want to be the precious hipster in art-school dropout glasses who bitches about pop culture. I don’t want to be a dude who can’t instantly bond with the bus driver or the client in a meeting. But…I got overwhelmed. There was too much for me, I know too much about CTE. I live with someone who has a head injury. I grew up in an abusive household in the ’70s when no one gave a shit about domestic violence, just like the NFL today. I did in-depth interviews with 30 neurologists on a project and listened to their stories and their anger at the game they too once loved and are now speaking out against (and some of them even live in Texas).

So I’m not going to debate you and have you be on that side and I’ll be on this side. I’m just telling you that for me it got to be too much. The bad overwhelmed the good. You’d think if Thompson could sit with Nixon for an hour and enjoy each other’s company I could figure out how to put aside my issues and watch a football game, but I can’t.

Then again, Hunter had the benefit of some serious drugs.

Calling Football Fans Stupid Doesn’t Accomplish Anything.

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I am kind of over people being incredibly sanctimonious about football. It doesn’t help.

Facebook is a minefield on days like yesterday. You have a bunch of people that are wicked hyped up about football and love it to death, some people who get into it when the timing is right, and then people who hate it. I can understand the reasoning behind every single stance on the NFL itself and football as a sport. It’s honestly hard to tell who’s more vocal about it lately – the screaming fans or the folks so adamantly anti-football that they’re willing to call football fans any name in the book. Idiots. Sheep. I honestly can’t even repeat some of the stuff I saw on Facebook yesterday, and this is the goddamn Clam, which is pretty much a mayonnaise fetish site at this point.

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Spread it on my buns. You know how I like it.

 

But calling football fans names and insulting their intelligence is not going to help solve any of the giant, looming problems the sport has. And it needs to stop. 

Of course, I say this as a person with a hockey-related tattoo. I’m sure everyone in high-horseville will knock twenty IQ points off their idea of me just for that, and I’ve totally lost Manic Pixie Dream Girl status with more than a few of you. I’ve got to be an absolute fucking dolt, right? Also I spent my teen and tween years in Foxboro, getting my schools paid for by ticket sales. So, biased. Obviously. Wake up, stupid!

Sports are culture, and it’s intertwined with how we live our lives. It’s not that simple. 

If you didn’t watch the game, you missed quite a fucking show. There’s no doubt about it. It was insane. It had everything, and it was only settled at the last few fucking seconds when of course, a rookie intercepts a pass and saves the damn day. Hollywood would kill for a script like that.

And I mean, Katy Perry’s Left Shark kind of won the entire night.

entertained

 

Here’s the rub: the inherent complexity and chess-like maneuvers of American football are not for idiots. You can watch, of course, slackjawed and with dog food for brains – but to cast the sport as something for rubes is missing the point completely. It’s a logic puzzle at times, a series of pick-your-own outcomes, and it turns out that sometimes it’s not chance, or sporting as hard as you can sport, but it’s brilliant coaching that makes the game. There are massively relatable characters on both teams. It feels fucking amazing to win. Men who have worked their whole lives for what they just accomplished celebrate on live TV, entire cities get to bask in something incredibly positive to keep the rest of the world’s shitty news at bay. Champions, baby.

The sport has major, major, glaring problems – there is no way to dance around that fact. There’s a huge, and reasonable, argument that it shouldn’t even exist because of the overarching negative health impact on the humans who play the game. I will go out on a limb and say that I don’t think kids should be playing it. We now know too much about how football can seriously hurt developing brains, and that even in high school, a player who may not even suffer a concussion can show changes in their brain with one season of play. One season. On the college level, too much money gets spent on football – taking everything to a grotesque level of admiration and hero worship, and the cover-up of absolutely awful, terrible behavior. It ends up being the farthest thing from academia one could even fathom.

On the NFL level, a blind eye towards the long-term effects of concussions on players, domestic violence, criminal activity, and racist-as-fuck team names leaves a terrible taste in a lot of mouths. There’s no painting that shit in a positive light. It’s awful. No excuses can be made for it, although there’s no lack of trying.

But here’s the thing: A sea change is coming. A wave of awareness has hit – there’s no escaping the mountains of data piling up, the news of cover-ups. Football fans and non fans know it’s bad. But the cognitive dissonance is still too vast a gulf to traverse right now, and it will take years of pushing to get change accomplished. That’s just the way it is.

Calling fans of the sport stupid is misguided and doesn’t help push for positive change at all. It just ends up being divisive, promoting backlash, and making the anti-football movement look bad. It’s like blaming Walmart employees for being poor instead of blaming fucking Walmart. And guess what? A lot of smart motherfuckers watch sports, and watch football.

It’s massively entertaining for a huge swath of our country’s population, if you’re wondering why. It’s as stimulating as a play, a movie, or an opera, at times. And almost every form of human entertainment we’ve got involves some kind of level of suffering. Look no further than what has just happened to Bobbi Kristina. Fame destroys people’s psyches. Heath Ledger. Michael Jackson. Brittany Murphy. Chris Farley. I could go on for hours. It’s not just football that leaves broken people in its wake, so singling out football fans as being stupid is disingenuous.

When you strip away its problems, the core of the sport is still deeply likable. It’s been ingrained in most of us since youth and it will not just turn off like a switch. The relationship between consumer and product with the NFL is not as symbiotic as people assume. The NFL is in charge, not the people watching – yet. It will take time, and it will take education, and it will take intense outside pressure on the league to change. And guess who needs to exert that pressure? Fans. Not the guy who wasn’t watching in the first place. If that guy not watching is a major fucking dick to the fans, it’s not going to work.

Also, go Pats.