Happy Birthday to Me!
I had a very nice birthday, thank you for asking. My youngest read Dr Seuss’ HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU, after which he very solemnly told me that he wished he could do for me what they do in Katroo.
I appreciate the sentiment, but if I calculate this correctly, in Katroo you end up with fifty hippo-heimers, baskets of orchids that smell of licorice, a pet that is tallest of allest, and a time telling fish large as a killer whale, requiring one to jump into the nearest large body of water rather than look at a small chronometer strapped to one’s wrist or affixed to a buttonhole by fine chain (which is as I have always done). Also, the illustration seems to promise a high fatality rate among the clippers and cloppers nipping and nopping at the blossoms, as they chop off the branches on which they stand.
So I am Fifty-Two today, and still in debt. If you, dear reader, which to bestow a birthday present, please do the following: go immediately to my beautiful and talented wife’s Amazon page here http://www.amazon.com/L.-Jagi-Lamplighter/e/B0028OGMLM and hit the LIKE button.
To my loyal fan ( you know who you are!) please do not fret that my beard is gray and my head is bald. In my heart, I am still full of zest and vim! No, that is false. In my heart, I have been a gray-souled and bitter cynic, crooked and hoary as Vainamoinen since I was thirteen. It is only as I grow old that my outward shape matches my inner age.
I calculate I have enough time left on Earth to write about another thirty books, that is assuming, of course, that I write a book a year, and live for another thirty years, and muse continues to visit me. This last factor is one over which I have no control.
The advantage of being a writer as opposed to a more physically demanding job (such as a professional daredevil who wrestles burning alligators while flung from an airplane in the stratosphere, or a professional robot-fighter) is that I should be able to continue at my preferred craft up until the moment when they bury me.
Of course, I have spoken with the Mi-Go of Yoggoth about the possibility of having my hand, still clutching a pen, crawl by itself out of the grave, stimulated to a hideous mockery of life by the formula in the ascending node to which one Charles Dexter Ward introduced me. Such a remote organ should be able to continue writing.
I have recently been studying up on my non-Euclidean calculus, and I think I can solve the time-paradoxes involved assimilating life into non-life from an ulterior dimensional omnihedral body.
However, my Father Confessor and professional robot-fighter Father de Casuistry tells me that, while posthumously written plays, such as THE KING IN YELLOW written after his reanimation by the unearthly poet Navarth Lokanaan, often receive favorable reviews at first from the established New York magazines, the series of criminal events, scandals, madness, suicides, and the opening of the Nethermost Door which inevitably follow the performances of postmortal works does not endear such unchancy works of art to the affection of the general public.
He reminds me of the various poems and writings which attempting to breach the boundaries, not just of taste and circumspection, but also attempted to break from the imagination realm of earth to the imagination realms circling some globe trapping the orbit distant and haunted star, such as Aldebaran, or cursed Arcturus.
Whispered to me in the confessional booth, the Father also told me that of all the stars in the galaxy, only Sol and two others actually destroy vampires by their light, Gamma Boötis (which the elfs who sang in Atlantis before its fall called Ceginus), and Oculus Boreus (which the Coleopterous race to rule the world after the extinction of man will call Ain). The performance of songs or sonnets from worlds whose stars reigned by differing rules might weaken the exception which permits Sol his special glory, to say nothing of the advantages bestowed upon visiting Kriptonians.
When I asked him how he could know such lore as that, he gave me more Hail Mary’s to say, and I had to do laps around the Basilica in full kit.
However, I see reports from Italy that the evil newsman and big game hunter Baron Lostchild and his mute serving man Tor were pulled from the sewer near the Vatican Observatory, not long after the Brother Escriva, the blind albino chief astronomer of Opus Dei, announced that they would make one final attempt to restore Nikola Tesla’s single remaining Moebius antennae to working order.
The bodies of the Baron and his man were blackened in thickened as if they were exposed to some tremendous energies before they died, and the teeth marks in their bones cannot be positively linked to any known form of shark.
I do know from rumors floating around the SWFA Mansion in New Jersey that the Baron was thinking of performing that same forbidden soliloquy from THE KING IN YELLOW, which Augustus Vanderdecken, the famed diabolist and comic book author, vowed to recite on top of Mount St. Helen’s on May 18th, 1980, despite his excommunication and the multiple warnings posted by the Vatican Seismologists and the American Council of Radical Psychiatric Surgery.
So, while the prospect of posthumous publication has its advantages, particularly in regard to the New York magazines in communion with temples on Pluto, I am afraid my Father Confessor has given me unambiguous instructions in that regard.
So, fans, increasing ages introduces no morbid thoughts in me. I shall certainly write until I am called to my judgment, but not a word after that gets published here on Earth, not until the quarantine is lifted.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
