Klang

I haven't been getting much sleep this week. Earlier it was the screech owl, then it was dreams that woke me, and I've been waking up very early in the morning (two or three hours before I need to get up) for no readily apparent reason.

So yesterday I went to bed almost as soon as I got home. However I was woken up some time around eleven o' clock and haven't had a wink of sleep since. I just couldn't get back to sleep no matter how tired I felt. Until six o' clock of course, forty-five minutes before I have to get up. So it's some time past eight right now and already I've been up for nine hours. Good start.

During the waking night my mind wandered ceaselessly. One of the subjects it touched on was a gremlin-like hand puppet I had when I was just a child. It was made of a very rubbery and clammy latex, glowed in the dark, and was one of the ugliest things I had ever seen. Naturally I cherished it and hid it in my mum's bed every night, much to her dismay. Many times she threatened to "...throw that ruddy thing out of the frigging window!" Eventually it gave her nightmares.

But I couldn't remember for the life of me what the damned thing was called. It wasn't a Gremlin, those were the fuzzy monsters that turned into evil critters if you fed them after midnight (and multiplied just by having a shower). It wasn't a goblin, that was too generic a term, I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called. I knew the toy's name however. The name was "Klang".

So a quick Google search for "klang hand puppet" turned up boglins. And I found the klang puppet I had when I was a child. There was a huge rush of nostalgia.

I also found that I'm not the only one who remembers boglins. There are several websites and YouTube channels dedicated to the hideous toys. One YouTube video in particular made me laugh so hard I had to smother myself with a pillow to avoid waking everyone else up.

Other than that I managed to paste the articles I'd written at work into the next issue of Scrap Nooz (still not finished); and I read another of H. P. Lovecraft's works entitled Celephaïs. There was a paragraph in the story which really got to me (it was more high, imagined fantasy than horror). It was very evocative and seemed to fit my mood as I lay reading to combat insomnia:

"But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."