The Diary of Mitch R. Singer

Mitch, circa 1966.

Good friend and loyal Pointless Venture reader Mitch R. Singer, best known for his eccentric folk music and his tenure as the host of reality show People Watching People Watching People, has volunteered to share excerpts from his diary. Mitch has a habit of not writing down exact dates, so we can't be certain when these entries were recorded.

Summer solstice, beneath a reaper moon, probably a Tuesday
Woke up in a field, with the wheat beaten down all around me. Smelled like sulfur and rotten feces. Strange markings cover my arms, some sort of hieroglyphics or possibly just a bad tattoo. Saunter about wheat maze for at least half of the night. Eventually reach the summit of a nearby hill, and upon sunrise, discover that beaten down wheat forms an immense crop circle. Looks kind of like a hot dog. Spent rest of the day wandering about, until reaching a small village. The inhabitants speak an unfamiliar dialect and poke me with sharp sticks. I am forced down into a pit, where children pelt me with rotten vegetables and cast the evil eye. Old gypsy woman urinates in hole and I am drenched. After awhile their gibberish starts to make sense, and I learn that they are preparing a funeral pyre. A grotesque old man with one eye and a peg leg says that only fire will cleanse the evil that stagnates within my being. I tell him that I just need a good bath, a warm meal, and perhaps some female companionship and I will be on my way. He spits at me and heaps dung down into my hole.

 ...

Month of May, the red eye of the sun high in the sky

Woke up in a ditch, flies buzzing around my head, the stench of the water soaking into my nice pea coat. Bloody taste in mouth that never goes away, no matter what I eat or drink. Walk along side the road, thumb up, waiting for a car that never comes. The woods seems to be full of crickets and a crashing noise like trees falling. Find a dead possum and contemplate the meaning of life. The possum has maggots crawling from its eye sockets. After several hours a pickup truck stops. It is driven by a gnarled-faced old hillbilly clad in a pair of overalls and a straw hat. He smells of fish and tells me to get into the back. I somehow fall asleep lying on a lumpy burlap sack that feels as though it contains bones. He drives for hours and hours.

... 

Midnight, indeterminable time of year
Come to while with a girl in a car overlooking a river. She smiles at me and asks to see my hands, says she can read palms. I don't recognize her, nor do I have any memory of how I got here. Her eyes glimmer and gleam dark secrets from my soul. I ask her if she has any food. She hands me a bag of beef jerky that I devour in seconds. A deep ache fill my loins as I listen to her talk about milking cattle. Something screams in the night, and I find myself running from the car, a fire burning in my chest. The girl calls and calls my name in a language I cannot speak. The air has a sweet sour smell to it like fresh blood.

...

No idea of time or date
Bright lights bring consciousness to me. I am bound to a chair in a dilapidated bathhouse, cracked white and black tile all around. A man incessantly pounds his fists against the raw torso of a cow hanging from a hook. A naked obese gentleman approaches me and offers me a cigarette. I take it and thank him, but he says nothing for a long time. Eventually he asks if I am the Gotham Creeper. I tell him that I can't recall what I had for breakfast. The man in the background keeps punching the cow carcass. There is an itch on my neck that I cannot scratch.

...

Sometime in December, midnight, I guess

I blink my eyes and people are before me, enraptured by the words coming out of my mouth. I am on a stage, dressed in black, a guitar in my hands. Snow falls outside, steady and white as milk poured from a bottle. Someone requests a cover of Freebird and I tell them to go to hell. The rest of my set is composed of Burt Bacharach tunes. I sandwich a song devoted to Cthulhu between Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head and A House Is Not a Home. No one seems to notice.