There is a point when desperation stops being French and romantic and becomes something much more real and scary. Is it so surprising to think then that maybe the homeless, displaced, and down trodden of the streets just might drink our blood at night? And if they do, is that so bad? Can you really blame them?
Sure, maybe they’re a little dated. It seems that the dark, horny, beauty of draculas in the 90s has been replaced by the swashbuckling flamboyance of pirates in the 00s. As Anne Rice made room for Roller Coaster rides the importance of blood and blood drinking was lost and now may be found in a less desirable place, on the dirty and dry lips of those retched wrecked souls called the walking homeless, those modern day street roaming nomads, those transient vagrants, the homeless.
Gone is the once kind playfulness of the run down tramp, and replacing that once romantic life of freedom and carelessness a life overflowing with the horrors and sadness of vampirism, night walking, and the curses of the changeling. No more can we look to shelters and parishes to protect and feed our lost brethren. No, oh no, for now no soup but blood soup can sustain these crazed people and fill there sickly stomachs teeming with maggots, rat fesses, and the skin from some poor souls neck. If anything these shelters have become the breeding grounds in this epidemic of homeless blood sucking terror as much as the streets of each and everyone of our great cities has. Gone I say, gone is the tin can and billy goat beard, gone is the train depot, the “sacked lunch” and the homemade fishing rod. All gone, all of them, everything, gone.
Do the homeless drink our blood at night? Sure they do, and why shouldn’t they, wouldn’t you? There’s nothing left to lose, and the sweetness of fresh blood is equal to any peppermint schnapps or three day old muffin crumbs. When you’re at the bottom of the income bracket it’s nice to know you’re at the top of the food chain.
Do they? Hell yes they do, or at least the ought to.
Cml, scared
Showing posts with label fear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fear. Show all posts
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
I want to believe
A couple of months ago Biasman decided to get me all excited by lying to me about a new film, a sequel to the 1998 X-Files, X-Files 2. I don't know why he said this. I guess he's just a mean hearted kind of guy. Even the joking jab about another X-Files movie got me so excited that when I considered how unbelievable that FOX didn't cancel the series when it was on, and how unbelievable that there is a 1998 movie based on the series of course I didn't believe the news of the sequel. I was heart broken.
Turns out Matt wasn't just having a go with me, for once he knew what he was talking about. I still don't know if I believe it. But there it is, and I want to believe it.
Matt and I are both big X-Files fans, though for the most part we have contrasting opinions about the show. None the less, we're excited. So I wanted to take this opportunity to both wax a bit and talk about sci-fi news; because thats the kind of nerd I am.
I got a bit of a head start on the X-Files compared to Biasman, but there is no doubt that Matt long ago surpassed me in knowledge about this show. While Matt's been able to see what I can only guess is every episode thanks to DVDs, torrents, and FOX at two in the morning on saturdays I had much more difficulty reaching the show. When I was younger my parents both watched the X-Files, and I did too... sort of, through closed eyes and gapping fingers. I was scared shitless by nearly every episode, except any that went along with the main story arc or had anything to do with Aliens. The reason I didn't find these very terrifying or interesting wasn't because they weren't any good but because not only was I just generally confused by the stories and regularly missed entire episodes but also because when you do watch a show through tightly closed eyes anticipating the worse it's usually quite difficult to bring anything away a program after about an hour.
I think that's what I really loved about the show though, how for a whole hour I was sitting there, torturing myself, just waiting to be scared. Why does everything that has ever terrified me in life have to be so damn interesting and intriguing?! It's just like nearly everything else I've talked about on this blog- just like the draculas and the wolf men and the old Parisian man- I liked the feeling of being scared but I also wanted, desperately, to know what was waiting in the dark for me, even if it killed and ate me after I saw it at least I'd finally know!
The X-Files doesn't scare me any longer but it does get me excited. Much the same way that when I was little the Goosebumps books and television show would excite and scare me, and truth be told the music from the TV program still does send a shiver down my spin. I remember first getting my library card, I rushed over to the 'young adult' section, what ever that meant, and grabbed everyone of the R.L. Stine's books that I could, as many as they'd allow me to take out. I'd lay them all down on my bed and just look at them, stare at there covers, too scared at the age to read them even if I could have. I did this every two weeks for nearly a year.
Anyways though, other exciting news about the new X-Files film is that Callum Keith Rennie is in it, that's right Leoben form Battle Star Galactica. Which also reminds me, BSG is back for a fourth and final season having made it though the Writers Strike. Don't the NBC CEOs kind of remind you of Cylons? ("I once put a laugh track on a sitcom that had no jokes in it" Side Note: Futurama is back on TV and has four all new extended episodes.) I haven't gotten a chance to watch the latest episode of the show but I plan to soon. If you haven't watched the re-imagined series of BSG before I highly recommend it, it's one of the best shows on television, has great political commentary, and is just a fraking good hour of hard sci-fi. Click here to see what you've been missing.
Also Xzibit and Billy Connolly are going to be in the X-Files sequel. But frankly I'm just glad that David Duchovny is working, wether it's X-Files, Californication or even another Connie and Carla, anything is good.
Well, it should be a good summer for sci-fi fans. If you've got any news leave it bellow of email us. If you're interested in a good read for the summer try listening to Billy Joel for once and pick up Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
Happy Birthday again Matthew
Caleb, fan
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Halloween, Part two
...continued...
When I was in middle and elementary school I’d trick or treat with Sean Anderson and my older brother would go out with his older brother, Bret. Sean and I were really good friends for a long time. Through kindergarten and most of elementary school Sean and his brother would come over for Halloween. We’d spend the whole afternoon running around the backyard, digging through the basement and pulling up weird toys and play weapons to bash around with. Just as it would start to get dark Sean and I would pull out a bin of old clothes, torn up shirts and knotted neck ties, old blue jeans with paint and fake blood smeared all over them. I never really knew what we were those Halloweens; sometimes zombies, sometimes scientists, sometimes just accident victims. I’d plan and plan for weeks what I was going to be each year for that one night and yet somehow it was easy enough to in just a few moments of drastic searching to transform Sean and myself from too laughing kids into two incredibly amused laughing faces of death. Every year something strange seemed to happen to Sean and I. Like one year, when we were invited into some old woman’s house and introduced to her comatose husband and like he was still all there, or when we thought we saw a UFO, or a T-Rex, or a woman with out a jaw, or when Sean got hit in the head so hard we thought he had a tumor, or the someone pointed out that Sean was black and didn’t live in our neighbor hood. I don’t know what we found more insulting that year, that someone would say something like that to two kids, or that after they did they gave us both apples instead of candy.
In my last year of high school I spent the Friday night before Halloween with those who at the time were the three people closest to me. Though they didn’t know it, or one another yet, to me they were the better part of every Friday night I’d had or would have for a long time in one way or another. I don’t really know how to write about this. Maybe if I put everything in context and added in all the details it’d make sense. But it isn’t that easy. It wasn’t just any other Friday night spent in a movie house; it wasn’t just a triple feature, it wasn’t just the week before what would be my last real Halloween. It was a lot more than all that. It was three really bad movies, with awful stories and flying fireballs. It was a headless lion tamer, a woman on roller skates, and eleven other orange ghosts. That night skeletons danced from the rafters, plot holes were left empty and Denmark became a mysterious island full of transvestite and murderers. Also though, that night was the first night I’d sleep next to a woman I loved. From that evening two things became very clear to me; firstly, that I was in love, and they loved me too, something as scary and exciting as any Halloween or murderous she-male. And secondly, that at that time I was friends with those choice few who I knew then and know now will be my friends for the rest of my life.
Two relationships began that October night, but only one lasted… As for the other, well, I guess love is much like Denmark, and we’re likely never to know exactly what happens there…
That same year, the first year I didn’t carve a pumpkin for Halloween, was the last year I went trick or treating. I’d bought a pumpkin- I just never got around to carving the damn thing. I did everything late that year. It wasn’t until the doorbell was ringing once every minute that I realized I needed to be out there too, running up and down the streets, shouting and laughing and getting louder and louder with every lost neon-orange-scattered-sunray. So I called my oldest friend, and Joshua came right over.
We were in prime trick or treating conditions, strong walking legs with upper bodies able enough to carry our knotted and wet pillow cases. Between us we would take turns wearing a football helmet, one of us an out of season coach and the other a bench warmer… Or something like that. We weren’t really that into it. We were more into the conversation mauling about between us as we trudged through the trenches of brittle leaves pilled high on either side of the street. Yes, maybe we were too old to be trick or treating, but we didn’t care. We didn’t much care for anything that year. We were seniors, we were old friends, we were tired, and it was kinda just nice to once again be with someone who was always there, someone who grew up fearing the same things as me, the same movies and monsters and classes and choices. Joshua and I had become friends under a willow tree looking through a toy magazine that was like porno to the two of us. Under that tree we wondered over art and star wars and miniature women. Growing older Joshua and I would stay friends. Throughout middle school we’d spend Friday nights at one another’s home. His dad would always rent two classics horror flicks for us and we’d pop in the VHS’ as soon as it got dark. The movies weren’t that scary by any current standards but we didn’t know that. That’s when I first watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and it’s the night I remember best. If we weren’t scared by the movies we would let ourselves get scared, make ourselves fear the glowing puppets and masks, fall into the hoax before us and roll in terror at our own jokes and horror stories. I learned what fear was with Joshua, what being scared and being a monster meant, and how one quite often lead to the next. When we got older things would change, and the glowing silver grey TV screen would turn brighter, more colorful, wavy with pause lines as we hesitated in the still silence of three o’clock, waiting, hoping no one else was awake besides us as be watched and rewatched over and over again the three second sex scenes in The Black Robe or Little Big Man. And even in that stillness I learned more about fear and waiting and excitement than I had ever before without Joshua. Years later in a haggard little Parisian motel room Josh and I would lie awake, too scared to use the bathroom in the early morning, talking back and forth between our cots as an old man walked up and down the hall, crossing-and-recrossing past our door. I reached up and scratched my nails hard against the cold rough wall and the noise was so chilling that I even scared myself with it; lost myself in the gag. I wasn’t just scaring Joshua, I was once again scaring myself with him; that moment, in that small room, my own nails imitating an old fiends dry grasp, Joshua’s breath in sync with mine, I was terrified and excited all at once as I hadn’t been since childhood. I had never felt closer to any other human being than I did at that moment to my oldest friend, Joshua Saganski.
...to be continued.
Caleb Michael, ghost
When I was in middle and elementary school I’d trick or treat with Sean Anderson and my older brother would go out with his older brother, Bret. Sean and I were really good friends for a long time. Through kindergarten and most of elementary school Sean and his brother would come over for Halloween. We’d spend the whole afternoon running around the backyard, digging through the basement and pulling up weird toys and play weapons to bash around with. Just as it would start to get dark Sean and I would pull out a bin of old clothes, torn up shirts and knotted neck ties, old blue jeans with paint and fake blood smeared all over them. I never really knew what we were those Halloweens; sometimes zombies, sometimes scientists, sometimes just accident victims. I’d plan and plan for weeks what I was going to be each year for that one night and yet somehow it was easy enough to in just a few moments of drastic searching to transform Sean and myself from too laughing kids into two incredibly amused laughing faces of death. Every year something strange seemed to happen to Sean and I. Like one year, when we were invited into some old woman’s house and introduced to her comatose husband and like he was still all there, or when we thought we saw a UFO, or a T-Rex, or a woman with out a jaw, or when Sean got hit in the head so hard we thought he had a tumor, or the someone pointed out that Sean was black and didn’t live in our neighbor hood. I don’t know what we found more insulting that year, that someone would say something like that to two kids, or that after they did they gave us both apples instead of candy.
In my last year of high school I spent the Friday night before Halloween with those who at the time were the three people closest to me. Though they didn’t know it, or one another yet, to me they were the better part of every Friday night I’d had or would have for a long time in one way or another. I don’t really know how to write about this. Maybe if I put everything in context and added in all the details it’d make sense. But it isn’t that easy. It wasn’t just any other Friday night spent in a movie house; it wasn’t just a triple feature, it wasn’t just the week before what would be my last real Halloween. It was a lot more than all that. It was three really bad movies, with awful stories and flying fireballs. It was a headless lion tamer, a woman on roller skates, and eleven other orange ghosts. That night skeletons danced from the rafters, plot holes were left empty and Denmark became a mysterious island full of transvestite and murderers. Also though, that night was the first night I’d sleep next to a woman I loved. From that evening two things became very clear to me; firstly, that I was in love, and they loved me too, something as scary and exciting as any Halloween or murderous she-male. And secondly, that at that time I was friends with those choice few who I knew then and know now will be my friends for the rest of my life.
Two relationships began that October night, but only one lasted… As for the other, well, I guess love is much like Denmark, and we’re likely never to know exactly what happens there…
That same year, the first year I didn’t carve a pumpkin for Halloween, was the last year I went trick or treating. I’d bought a pumpkin- I just never got around to carving the damn thing. I did everything late that year. It wasn’t until the doorbell was ringing once every minute that I realized I needed to be out there too, running up and down the streets, shouting and laughing and getting louder and louder with every lost neon-orange-scattered-sunray. So I called my oldest friend, and Joshua came right over.
We were in prime trick or treating conditions, strong walking legs with upper bodies able enough to carry our knotted and wet pillow cases. Between us we would take turns wearing a football helmet, one of us an out of season coach and the other a bench warmer… Or something like that. We weren’t really that into it. We were more into the conversation mauling about between us as we trudged through the trenches of brittle leaves pilled high on either side of the street. Yes, maybe we were too old to be trick or treating, but we didn’t care. We didn’t much care for anything that year. We were seniors, we were old friends, we were tired, and it was kinda just nice to once again be with someone who was always there, someone who grew up fearing the same things as me, the same movies and monsters and classes and choices. Joshua and I had become friends under a willow tree looking through a toy magazine that was like porno to the two of us. Under that tree we wondered over art and star wars and miniature women. Growing older Joshua and I would stay friends. Throughout middle school we’d spend Friday nights at one another’s home. His dad would always rent two classics horror flicks for us and we’d pop in the VHS’ as soon as it got dark. The movies weren’t that scary by any current standards but we didn’t know that. That’s when I first watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and it’s the night I remember best. If we weren’t scared by the movies we would let ourselves get scared, make ourselves fear the glowing puppets and masks, fall into the hoax before us and roll in terror at our own jokes and horror stories. I learned what fear was with Joshua, what being scared and being a monster meant, and how one quite often lead to the next. When we got older things would change, and the glowing silver grey TV screen would turn brighter, more colorful, wavy with pause lines as we hesitated in the still silence of three o’clock, waiting, hoping no one else was awake besides us as be watched and rewatched over and over again the three second sex scenes in The Black Robe or Little Big Man. And even in that stillness I learned more about fear and waiting and excitement than I had ever before without Joshua. Years later in a haggard little Parisian motel room Josh and I would lie awake, too scared to use the bathroom in the early morning, talking back and forth between our cots as an old man walked up and down the hall, crossing-and-recrossing past our door. I reached up and scratched my nails hard against the cold rough wall and the noise was so chilling that I even scared myself with it; lost myself in the gag. I wasn’t just scaring Joshua, I was once again scaring myself with him; that moment, in that small room, my own nails imitating an old fiends dry grasp, Joshua’s breath in sync with mine, I was terrified and excited all at once as I hadn’t been since childhood. I had never felt closer to any other human being than I did at that moment to my oldest friend, Joshua Saganski.
...to be continued.
Caleb Michael, ghost
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes: A short piece on fear
Some of the scariest things in life aren’t phobias but necessities. When people grow up they put better names to things, but when we’re young we don’t have sociophobia, agoraphobia, and necrophobia, you’re just scared, of things like strangers, being alone, and bogeymen.
I do not know about you, but most of my greatest fears in life are those same things I was afraid of when I was just a little kid. But I’m not talking about losing a toy or a person or yourself, I’m talking about that feeling you got every Halloween that’d cause you to bring your legs up close to your body in bed just in case a madman tried to chop off your legs. Before I even knew what a madman was, what was really mad, what Friday the thirteenth meant or why white vans were terrifying I knew I was scared of all of them, with no little help from my older brother. For years I slept in the center of my bed, clutching a heavy flashlight (and in later years a police baton), my arms folded over my chest like some ancient honored pharos, just out of reach from any hands from any place under my bed. Before I knew what anxiety was I had seen hell’s fires, Bram’s asylum, crazed dogs and lost children, greater fear’s than fevered dreams, things far worse than Goosebumps, X-files, and Are you Afraid of the Dark?, horrors unheard of but ever imagined since the first sons of man were old enough to torment the second sons, because what else are older brothers good for. Shit! It’s a wonder any of us ever left our rooms on some of those darker nights. But through it all there has only ever been one fear that has always stayed with me, that one fear (besides seaweed) introduced to me by 1941’s The Wolf Man: Gypsies!
I’m not too worried about strangers or being alone any longer, but bogeymen and gypsies still scare the daylights out of me. I don’t know what did it, if it was the ragged clothes, the eeriness of the fortuneteller’s eyes, all black and white, a Dracula in different clothes Bela Lugosi nearly plays himself, a wild European madman staring out of cursed eyes. Or, maybe it was just the fact that they traveled in wagons, lived in them, from village to village, like some sort of communist trailer park carnival people, which is quite possibly the most evil amalgam of Euro/Anglo/Americana trash known to man. The Wolf Man’s story draws it’s plot and circumstance from folk lore, making use of myth and storytelling to build the Wolf Man as an ancient evil. And that’s what gypsies are- ancient evil folk people. So you know they’ve got nothing to lose, and that is scary.
Most fears are irrational, and the scariest stories, murders, monsters and ghouls are spun of spider webs already in our heads. But even so, this one fear of mine, this one real fear I have left over from childhood I think I’d rather like to hold on to for as long as I can, no matter how irrational it is. There are far worse things in life to be afraid of than gypsies, and once we get past all our irrational fears all that’s left are the rational ones, and all those are truly terrifying.
Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
-Caleb, un-truly terrifying
I do not know about you, but most of my greatest fears in life are those same things I was afraid of when I was just a little kid. But I’m not talking about losing a toy or a person or yourself, I’m talking about that feeling you got every Halloween that’d cause you to bring your legs up close to your body in bed just in case a madman tried to chop off your legs. Before I even knew what a madman was, what was really mad, what Friday the thirteenth meant or why white vans were terrifying I knew I was scared of all of them, with no little help from my older brother. For years I slept in the center of my bed, clutching a heavy flashlight (and in later years a police baton), my arms folded over my chest like some ancient honored pharos, just out of reach from any hands from any place under my bed. Before I knew what anxiety was I had seen hell’s fires, Bram’s asylum, crazed dogs and lost children, greater fear’s than fevered dreams, things far worse than Goosebumps, X-files, and Are you Afraid of the Dark?, horrors unheard of but ever imagined since the first sons of man were old enough to torment the second sons, because what else are older brothers good for. Shit! It’s a wonder any of us ever left our rooms on some of those darker nights. But through it all there has only ever been one fear that has always stayed with me, that one fear (besides seaweed) introduced to me by 1941’s The Wolf Man: Gypsies!
I’m not too worried about strangers or being alone any longer, but bogeymen and gypsies still scare the daylights out of me. I don’t know what did it, if it was the ragged clothes, the eeriness of the fortuneteller’s eyes, all black and white, a Dracula in different clothes Bela Lugosi nearly plays himself, a wild European madman staring out of cursed eyes. Or, maybe it was just the fact that they traveled in wagons, lived in them, from village to village, like some sort of communist trailer park carnival people, which is quite possibly the most evil amalgam of Euro/Anglo/Americana trash known to man. The Wolf Man’s story draws it’s plot and circumstance from folk lore, making use of myth and storytelling to build the Wolf Man as an ancient evil. And that’s what gypsies are- ancient evil folk people. So you know they’ve got nothing to lose, and that is scary.
Most fears are irrational, and the scariest stories, murders, monsters and ghouls are spun of spider webs already in our heads. But even so, this one fear of mine, this one real fear I have left over from childhood I think I’d rather like to hold on to for as long as I can, no matter how irrational it is. There are far worse things in life to be afraid of than gypsies, and once we get past all our irrational fears all that’s left are the rational ones, and all those are truly terrifying.
Oh, look out you rock 'n rollers
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
Ch-ch-Changes
Pretty soon now you're gonna get older
Time may change me
But I can't trace time
-Caleb, un-truly terrifying
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