Randonautica Journal: Lovecraft
I'm probably going to make a habit of going out on Rando-walks a couple times a week since I'm a fat middle aged guy who never gets any exercise. I'll try not to jam this blog up with trip reports. Or, I don't know, maybe I'll start a new blog just for those.
After my first experience with the app where I listened to death metal and ended up on a frozen pond where what appeared to be a chicken had been killed, I was hooked. I needed to try it again and change up the variables. Because I'm in the middle of a significant web dev project right now and I don't have the time to be popping over to other cities, I once again dropped in on Exeter and, like last time, I tossed a couple cards to see where I ought to start. I dropped The King of Wands which had me scratching my head: an inspiring leader. Exeter is historic and all but not like Boston or Philly. The only thing that jumped out at me was the old movie theater which doesn't sound all that important now but just wait. I tossed a second card for clarification. 3 of swords. Yeah. The movie theater.
The Ioka Theater was one of the oldest movie theaters in America, dating back to 1915, I think. Seacoast, New Hampshire never had much going on in it so if we had any landmarks, this was definitely one of them. It was an old-school movie theater with a big lit marquee. You could lease one side of it for a day and say happy birthday to someone or whatever. It was really nice. By the time it was on my radar, it's best days were behind it and it ran second-run flicks but the guy who owned it for most of my lifetime had it all figured out and did special engagements throughout the year and the place really came alive. It had these gnarly old carbon arc projectors which is nothing like the more modern platter projectors from before everything went digital. You had to manually load the film reels on to it. They also had the setup to run 3D movies. So the dude would book engagements of movies like Rocky Horror, The Wizard of Oz (with this crazy ass light and sound show to accompany it, including a smoke machine), silent horror movies with live musical accompaniment, Dial M For Murder in 3D, etc. And these movies drew a real crowd. It was like going to the movies in the 30's or something. It was a real event. But then it all became a burden. He wasn't selling tickets like he used to and sold the place to some jackass who liked movies but couldn't make it work like the old dude did. My brother and I met up with him a couple of times to discuss screening midnight movies and Spookshows and his attitude was really shitty. We didn't give a shit about making money from it. All he talked about was that you couldn't make money doing those shows. Not long after, dude gutted the place, sold off everything inside. Seats, projectors, the concession stand, and disappeared with whatever he managed to make off the sale. And then the place went dark. There were a couple plans by enterprising individuals to bring it back, preserve it, whatever, but nothing stuck and right now, as I write this, it's being gutted so that it can be remodeled for condos. Which bums me out like you wouldn't believe. The seacoast is in the middle of an over-development craze. There are all these ugly-ass luxury condos going up where the community's character used to be.
I loved going to the movies. Always have. It always felt like a special occasion when I was a kid and there was definitely something special when you ended up at a place like The Ioka because it had this out-of-time quality to it. And I was heartbroken when the place went to hell and couldn't be saved. Walking by today, seeing it without the old marquee was like a knife in the heart. See where I'm going with this?
So I started there.
I recently read a long-ass Reddit post about Randonautica theory that blew my fucking mind and it inspired me to try the Blind Spot setting. I don't fully understand how this works but Blind Spots are statistical anomalies in the process of random number generation. If you flip a coin, roll a die, etc. patterns eventually emerge from the chaos. The best expression of this is ostensibly something called The Chaos Game, which is legitimately amazing. If you watch the video below, you get an idea for it. You can apply the principle to human behavior as well. Even though we think we're being random, there are so many factors that influence our decision making that there are going to be gaps in our map of reality, these spots where we never go, that we may be aware of in some way but never think about, decisions that we'll never make, for one reason or another. The Blind Spots setting in Randonautica does its special quantum math shit, finds a point in the probability blind spot and puts a pin there and that's where I went today.
I set the intention for Lovecraft because I happen to be listening to the BBC's Lovecraft Investigations podcast and I'm very much in that mode right now. If you've never heard of H.P. Lovecraft, that's actually kind of amazing given his serious internet culture bona fides these days but in summary: Lovecraft was a writer in the early 20th century who pioneered a genre of fiction called Weird Fiction that was eventually folded into the greater body of horror. Though he died broke and obscure in the 40's, he had a small but dedicated following who carried the torch into the 1960's where he was noticed by dudes like Ramsay Campbell and Stephen King, who spared no opportunity to riff on his Cthulhu mythos cycle and weave his conventions into their own stories. He was a life long resident of Providence, Rhode Island, but for a brief period of time where he lived in Brooklyn with a woman that he somehow managed to convince to marry him. Lovecraft was, unfortunately, a thoroughly repellent individual. So racist was he, that even in a time when everyone was casually racist, most folks were like, "Shit, Howard. Take it down a notch." In spite of his flaws, his stories are truly unique and terrifying things. There hasn't been a voice as unique as his and since his time, everyone else has just been riffing on his material.
Lovecraft was way ahead of the curve in his writing in that he employed a sort of shared universe that fans have come to call The Mythos. Stories would reference locations, characters, dire occult tomes, impossibly ancient space gods, weaving it all together into a larger story, whether he intended this or not. Characters in his stories are almost always erudite gentlemen of society or academia that unwittingly stumble into a mystery that leads them invariably to madness and doom. With the exception of The Dunwich Horror, there really isn't a story of his that has anything approaching a happy ending. Everyone discovers the terrible truths of the universe and it drives them to madness. Ancient space gods, terrible entities from beyond, prehistoric races frozen in Antarctic ice, wait just out of reach of us insignificant mortals. For, when the stars are right, they will return to claim what is theirs. It's seriously awesome shit and way more IRL occult than I think most folks realize. Author, Peter Levenda, has devoted no small amount of words to exploring the Lovecraft/Crowley connection and it certainly wasn't lost on Kenneth Grant. All of his work is in the public domain. There are numerous omnibus editions out there for short money but you can also download a complete archive of his fiction here.
Holding this intention and walking out to a blind spot could only lead me to mystery! Or maybe not. Once again I kept an open mind, shortened the map radius to something way more manageable than my last walk and dropped the pin. Where the last one was out on the edge of town, this one was firmly in town and ended up in a small clutch of neighborhoods about a mile away. I intended, once again, to have my earbuds in and listen to the Lovecraft podcast to see what sort of effect it had on the adventure but I left my Airpods at home and instead walked in silence. Not a bad thing, actually. Having nothing but my own internal monologue to keep me while I walked would be an interesting experiment.
Exeter is a pretty interesting old town. It's very much old New England and if you walk down the main drag on Water Street you get a real feel for that. I hadn't really stopped to appreciate this quality until I made the walk. It still very much has the old facades of old-timey Exeter. At one point I pass 121 and notice that the door has a listing for a shop specializing in Alchemy and Herbs. What? How have I never noticed this? Is this a place you can just go to? I may have to look a little deeper into this. I take note of the address and run 121 through the NAEQ cypher. I get these words and phrases:
A word not known, am divided, delicious, despised, fall down into, his whole body, lust & power, mountain, my lord Hadit, o chosen one, rapturous, rejoice, of Ra and Tum, thou shalt know, strike hard, your proof
John Phillips was an Exeter bigwig back in the day. I really don't know much about the guy at all and I should probably look him up. I take a snap of the commemorative plaque because Phillips was Lovecraft's middle name and keep walking. Eventually, I leave the downtown area and ascend into the nearby hills where it's just residential neighborhoods.
I'd recently read of a particular anxiety that comes with Randonauting. It's a sort of out-of-place paranoia that you feel, being in this place that you don't feel you belong in and this was definitely happening to me here. I'm just walking through this neighborhood, a lone dude in a mask and a hoodie, taking pictures of houses. I'm sure that to any witnesses, I must have looked like I was scoping out houses to rob or whatever. I notice an odd detail on the first house on this street, though, and I have to take a picture. Its address is zero.
Another house on the route with a compass on it? Is this decoration really that common? Also, I pass a house where the owners are clearly not into dog shit. I mean, who is, really? But this house was surrounded by these signs. And then I arrive at the destination.
Like last time, the pin is off the road a ways, but unlike last time, I can't go walking up to this one. It's in the middle of someone's yard. I can see it from the road, though, and nothing really stands out to me about it. It's a wide yard with not much in it. The pin seems to be centered on the only tree in the yard, a sort of janky looking pine tree of some variety. In front of it, is a leafy plant of some sort.
I spend some time really looking around at my surroundings in case what I'm looking for isn't obvious before deciding to move on. I take a couple steps and notice something sticking out of the garage.
If ever there was a sign, a license plate bearing a command word on it in the middle of this psychic state I'm in is definitely something to heed. So I stop, clear my head and listen. A few seconds later, the ambiance of the neighborhood is broken by a loud caw! I look up and there's my buddy, a lone crow perched in the nearest tree. I salute him and continue to walk and he seems to follow me from above, hopping and gliding from branch to branch as I walk out of the neighborhood. I haven't gone a hundred feet when a nearby house catches my eye. The style of the roof is a gambrel. Why is this significant? Lovecraft was always writing about houses with gambrel roofs. He was a humongous nerd and had a real boner for architecture. There's something distinctly regional about them. You see them here and there up this way but gambrel roofs aren't exactly a common feature of house designs up here in New Hampshire. You tend to see them more down around Rhode Island and New York. Not exclusively, of course. Just far more common than you do here.
I always thought it was just me but maybe, just maybe, something about the very shape of the gambrel roof was spooky to Lovecraft as well. I always associate the shape with the DeFeo Murder House, made famous by the Amityville Horror. Way before I'd even ever seen or heard of the movie, my parents had a copy of the paperback in the house, with that demonic facade of the house featured prominently on the cover. There was nothing intrinsically scary about it. There was just something about the house's design. Like it had a face and the top-most windows were lit to look like eyes. Maybe Lovecraft saw something similar in the designs. His houses with gambrel roofs were never nice places.
I walk back and, unlike, last time, I walk out a different way than I came in. The trek back is mostly just me keeping an eye out for anything interesting and sorting my thoughts out in my head for the article that I'm going to inevitably write later on and, for the most part, it passes without incident. Until I reach the boat house on the edge of the Swasey River. I've lived here my whole life and I've had so many opportunities to do this but until this moment, I never have and the second this thought hit me, I couldn't believe that it had taken me this long to do it. Honestly, the thought to do this had not once ever occurred to me. Definitely under the influence of Randonautica, I approached the boat launch and carefully made my way down to the ice.
The Swasey River freezes over in the winter and from January to March you can find small clutches of huts anchored to the ice, occupied by grizzled old dudes ice fishing. It's like a temporary autonomous zone occupied by really weird people who just have to fucking fish in spite of a 10-inch barrier between them and their catch. Ice fishing isn't exactly New England-specific, but this particular experience felt very New England, and this is a crucial part of the Lovecraft experience. The menace of the ocean looms large over Lovecraft's horror and ruddy old fishermen are often featured, if not as woeful antagonists, corrupted by Dagon's lurid song from beneath the waves, then just mindless cretins that set the tone for an educated gentleman, trapped in the decrepit port of Innsmouth for the night. The dude I talked with was friendly as hell, though. Nice guy, though I could tell he thought I was some kind of liberal pussy with that mask on, but he didn't say shit.
I ended up on the ice in my last adventure, and even though it shifted and cracked, had I fallen through, I would have just been up to my knees in freezing, muddy water. Here, had I fallen through, a sensation that I couldn't shake, I was a goner, real waking nightmare material here. But the wonder of standing in this place that I'd never thought to go was enough to keep me there, taking in the moment of this blind spot. Eventually I walk out and notice an eye drawn on a sign attached to a nearby building and it occurs to me that I had seen, like, three more eyes on this journey and wonder what the significance of this could be. That's definitely a pattern. I didn't think to take pictures of them, however. There's one drawn on one of the ice houses, as well.
After that, I'm basically back at my car, considering what I had just experienced. The Lovecraft mindset didn't bring me face to face with unspeakable cosmic horror, but it did make me keenly aware of old town Exeter in a way that I think Lovecraft would have appreciated. He was a real New England dude with an appreciation for antiquity. He always felt like he was a man out of time, born too late, and here I am walking around this town where much of the real estate was built before the Revolution. I was hoping I'd find a house with at least a witch window, alas I did not.