Cthulu Is Out To Get Me

Apparently, the Elder Gods are once again stirring in their sleep, disturbing the primordial ooze of stygian blackness which surrounds them, emanating foul vibrations through the ether; vibrations which resound with an evil so pure to be blinding, like the black equivalent of a pure white laser aimed directly into the eye of the cosmos. He Who Cannot Be Named is dreaming on a level incomprehensible to the human psyche (to glimpse even a tiny shard would drive whole worlds mad, turning the peoples thereupon into slavering, raving maniacs).

Shoggoth! Cthulu! Why do you taunt me so? Have I not had enough flat tires on my commute to satiate your weird and incomprehensible hunger?

Yes, Dear Reader, I once again played the "stop every half mile and re-air the rear tire" game on the way home from work. When I got home (finally) I put the bike in the shop, and went to the store to get a Slime tube, having neither the energy nor the will to put Stan's in another tube.

The clerk at Arkham Bikes, a young New Englander named Lovecraft, remarked on my appetite for self-sealing tubes, noting that I have bought more than any two other customers of his establishment over these past few months.

But, even as he professed sympathy for my wretched luck with flat tires, I thought I could see something, something unspeakably evil and reptillian, old beyond measure... something like amusement in his eyes, amusement like that of a small boy watching a toad try to escape from a fiendish trap laid with no purpose other than to torture the lesser being for amusement. But, then he he smiled, and the feeling passed, dispersing like the fog above a graveyard when disturbed by an unearthly zephyr on an otherwise totally still night.

When I got home from that errand, and a couple of others, an hour and a half later, the accursed tire was still holding air! What manner of horrors will be revealed to me next? Shall the headlight bulb burn out, only to restore itself with the coming of a new dawn, after having left me exposed to the creeping horrors on the dark roads homeward? Will my saddle spring from its rails, only to reattach as I reach my destination and no longer need a perch upon which to sit and rest my weary bones? I know not, monsieurs and mesdames!

So, I am going to hope that it is well-sealed, and leave it on the bike. If it is flaccid by the time I rise in pre-dawn darkness, I'll put the new Slime tube in and go to work. If it continues to retain higher than atmospheric air pressure, I will just carry the Slime tube with me, as an amulet, a holy relic to protect me from the vagaries of the Elder Gods.

Shub-Niggurath, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth... leave my inner tubes out of your eldritch machinations!

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