09/06/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.

Yeah, I was going to take it easy, but this post inspired me. In that font, ‘Miskatonic’ looks a lot like ‘Whiskey Tonic.’ …And, well, it’s just so obvious from there on out.

It is true that I have set on fire the premises and contents of my own distillery, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not an arsonist. At first I shall be called a criminal — no better than the petty-thieves that languish in their cells at our state penitentiaries. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have acted otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror — that thing in my hip-flask.

Like many a person who threw himself blindly into the fractal singularity of university, I awoke one morning to discover myself ejected from that relentless embrace with nothing but a piece of inscribed paper and a variety of ill-formed opinions to show for it. All around me stood other, similarly-vomited individuals, all blinking in their loaned gowns and motherboards. Like new-hatched turtles we shambled here and there under the pitiless June sun, blindly searching out for some half-understood sea or at least shade; while far above us banks and other predators idly circled, waiting for the first signs of weakness or fatigue. But not right away, for they were patient, and knew how to wait.

I was more fortunate than my fellows, or so I thought at the time. My provincial and blinkered parents had been ridiculously insistent that the majority of my classes be in such things as engineering and chemistry, to the point where I had a degree in those eldritch subjects; they had likewise been tedious on the subject of loans. I was forced – forced! – to spend my summers and weekends working to make up the slack, which I bitterly resented up to the moment where I realized that the crushing burden of student debt was, in my case, entirely absent from my shoulders.