scribble

 (written at a previous date)

    Dear Harriet Walter,

    I have a habit of writing things down on my hands when I'm going to bed and don't want to forget something. Now this is a relatively normal thing, I know, as lots of people do it during the day, but it gets better when you realize that I write these things in the dark when I am mostly asleep.

    I can't always remember what I was thinking when I wrote the things. For example, one time I woke up with the words "sexual deadline" on my left palm. I don't know whether this was just a phrase I thought of and liked or a complaint or a threat or what.

    Another time, a few weeks ago I woke up and the words "who voiced the Wart?" were on there, which was really fucking disturbing until I remembered that I'd realized in my slumbering stupor that in Disney's movie The Sword in the Stone (based on the first part of, what hey, The Once & Future King) the character of the Wart/young Arthur sounds completely different in the beginning from how he does in, say, the fish scene, or the whole rest of the damn movie. And I'd wanted to look the movie up and see if he had more than one voice actor. (He had three.)

    And today I woke up and saw upon my forearm, mostly rubbed away, the following passage:

    A sickened, sensitive shadow, writhing in hands that were not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low

    Yes, children, this is the danger of reading H.P. Lovecraft before bed. You wake up and you have lines from "Nyarlathotep" scrawled on your goddamn body.

    I love books.