There are a lot of interesting things to see on a walk in my neighborhood. Thing is, you need to know the right directions to walk in and you gotta walk in them a long time, and you need to walk in every direction you can go before you know which ones got anything interesting to show you.

For example, operating clandestinely in this neighborhood is a cult worshipping the supposedly pre-christian god Hastur (or Xastur depending on certain syntactic subtleties).

I say ‘supposedly’ pre-christian because Hastur (again, sometimes Xastur dependent on syntax) is in fact an invention of the twentieth century, conjured up by writers of weird fiction like Ambrose Bierce and Robert “Robbie” Chambers for their stories.

Were these idiots in my neighborhood aware of these stories, they would perhaps not have this confusion. The source of this confusion is a little book called the Simon’s Necronomicon, one of many gag and occult texts printed in the mid-seventies. The Simon’s takes legitimate pre-christian texts of worship (Sumerian, Babylonian, etcetera etcetera), and messes around with them. It omits key passages and adds new ones, and removes the names of various figures and swaps them out for fictive deities (Bierce and Chambers’ Hastur, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, etcetera etcetera).

While the book does still contain reference to legitimate gods (Zoroaster, Tiamat, Anu, etcetera etcetera), the changes that are made have the effect of totally neutering the magic potential of the spells given in certain chapters (Believe me, I have tried them.) However, make no mistake this book is still dangerous in the wrong hands.

I recall one case from Santa Monica in the late nineties: Some homeless in his early twenties has his girlfriend -- a quote-unquote ‘rebellious’ fourteen year old suburbanite (you know the type) -- over at an abandoned warehouse he’s made nest at. There, he uses her in a certain rite, the particularities of which I will not go into great depth about here, in an attempt to rouse the ‘Old Ones’ of the Simon’s from their slumber of millenia. Needless to say, the poor girl’s dead now --and all for nothing seeing as Hastur/Xastur isn’t capering down the streets of the world as I write this.

THIS IS THE DANGER IN THESE SORTS OF BOOKS. In the hands of a weak mind, they inspire great selfishness and evil. To who else but an embittered and unstable freak like this homeless would ever think that they could or should bring about the end of days --call R’lyeh up from the oceans or Carcosa out of the stars-- with something they got at a Barnes & Noble?

As far as I know, the idiots in my neighborhood have not gotten up to anything dangerous just yet, and what’s more I doubt they will. They are a group made up entirely of ‘rebellious’ suburbanites, and I’m sure we both know that type rarely is wont to do anything serious. Until this group encounters any unstable elements such as that homeless all those years ago --types desperate enough and with little enough to lose that they get up to the serious stuff no problem-- I am confident this little group will remain nothing more than a local curiosity, although one worth further investigation.