We need to get one thing absolutely and unequivocally straight before the coffee hits your bloodstream on this spectacularly cursed Sunday morning: the universe is actively conspiring against you, and it has circled March 15th on its celestial calendar with a thick, red Sharpie.  The soothsayers were not just blowing smoke up the collective togas of the Roman elite when they whispered about the Ides of March.  They were tapping into a fundamental, chronologically recurring frequency of sheer, unadulterated doom.  You know the story (or at least you’d better, dear reader).  Julius Caesar – a man who, by all historical accounts, possessed an ego large enough to require its own zip code – wandered into the Theatre of Pompey and caught 23 sharp pieces of Senate-approved metal in the ribs.  The lesson here is not merely about the pitfalls of imperial ambition or the staggering unreliability of coworkers.  The lesson is that mid-March is a phenomenologically toxic wasteland, a temporal sinkhole where bad things happen to people who forget to check their blind spots.

Beware the Ides, dear reader.  Lock your doors, pour yourself a violently strong beverage, and trust absolutely no one who approaches you wearing a poorly tailored bedsheet.

But the bleeding out of a Roman dictator is merely an appetizer in this buffet of historical madness.  If a Roman assassination isn’t enough to curdle your morning gin, remember it was on this exact day, in the thoroughly bleak and unforgiving year of 1937, in the quiet, respectable, Providence, Rhode Island gloom that smelled of mildew and unnamable regret, Howard Phillips Lovecraft – H.P. to the initiates, the Old Gent to the cultists – finally shuffled off this mortal coil and into whatever squamous, non-Euclidean dimension waits for the truly committed materialists who accidently invented a new kind of religious terror.

And brother, did he ever.

The man weaponized the absolute indifference of the universe and turned it into prose so dense, so feverish, so baroque in its despair that reading him feels like having your amygdala French-kissed by something that has no business existing in three dimensions.  While the rest of the pulp hacks were busy slapping vampires and werewolves into tidy little morality plays – good triumphs, evil gets a stake through the heart, roll credits – Lovecraft looked at the night sky and said, No.  Fuck that.  The real terror is that the sky is looking back and it doesn’t even register you as a protein.  He gave us entities that didn’t want your soul, didn’t want your women, didn’t even want your worship in any meaningful way.  They simply Were, vast, ancient, cyclopean, and utterly, serenely uninterested in the screaming little primates who’d accidentally poked the wrong corner of reality.  Cthulhu doesn’t rise to rule us; he rises because his nap alarm went off.  The color out of space doesn’t corrupt the countryside for sport; it corrupts in the way radiation corrupts tissue – because that’s what it does.  There is no moral.  There is no catharsis.  There is only the slow, inexorable realization that the universe is not hostile, which would at least be dramatic.  It’s worse.  It’s bored.

And the motherfucker did it all while half-starved, writing letters to anyone who’d listen, nursing grudges the size of Azathoth’s court, and maintaining a prose style so ornate it makes Victorian wallpaper look minimalist.  He was a walking contradiction: a materialist who dreamed like a mystic, a racist who created a mythology so transcendently misanthropic it eventually outgrew every ugly personal tic that birthed it, a recluse who accidentally founded a literary religion that now has more true believers than most actual religions.

So today, on the Ides that also happens to be the anniversary of his exit, raise whatever you’re drinking – coffee, whiskey, the black bile of existential nausea, whatever – and tip it toward Providence.  Not in mourning, exactly.  Lovecraft would have hated that.  More like a salute between two people who both know the joke, and the joke is that there is no punchline, on the endless, star-strewn, indifferent dark.

And beware the Ides.  Not because you’ll be stabbed in a senate – though, hey, read the group chat – but because March 15 is an annual reminder that two things are true at once: power gets checked, and the universe does not care about your press release.  Light a cheap candle for Lovecraft today, then go outside and notice how ordinary the sky looks, which is exactly what makes it terrifying.

N.P.: “Ritual” – Ghost