Wyte

A significantly appreciable time later, if you will pardon the emphatic redundancy, I finished the second draft of Wyte. And now for something completely different (and then returning to hack it to scraps with the murderous machete of editing).

I'll just pretend like there wasn't a gap of two months without posts. I'll update as things become relevant or read-worthy, or as frequently as I can.

Other projects to work on include The Book Without a Name and Walk in the Park, possibly Blessing. Also, I may have a horror short story if I can ever figure a solid ending to it, which I suppose I would post here.

In other news, I have: 
        -Rediscovered Chipotle 
        -Attempted paddle boarding (the garish beacon of my freakishly pale, grub-like skin reflecting the sun likely caused satellite disruption) 
        -Become deeply enamored with red box
        -An anniversary tomorrow with my wife. It's been a good year. Perhaps the night shift-induced isolation has inflicted sufficient stockholm syndrome on her, but either way she has been remarkably understanding and patient with my constant nitpicking over obscure details and my desire to slink away and write instead of attend family functions. I also have a library set up. It is magnificent.

In the realms of book-reading I have discovered that Simple Plan is a very well written thriller by Scott Smith and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is as pretentious as... well... using words like magnificent to describe a bunch of half filled bookshelves of odds and ends that are crammed into a room more notable for its catacomb heaps of empty water bottles and the dusty corpses of vanquished frozen lasagnas. McCarthy is a fantastic writer at times, but I can only take so many. Sentence fragments. Dramatic. Emphatic. Systematic and metaphoric. Portions. Before it becomes so disjointed that immersion is impossible.

In still other news, a lab mouse is an efficient, effective snack from a caloric point of view. Feeling a little sluggish at the gym? One mouse contains about 40 calories, but approximately 4 grams of protein. This is not to endorse or encourage eating wild animals without first consulting a psychiatrist.

Moved

In the wild uncertainty of a world neither known nor understood I can draw a great comfort from the few constants that exist.

Death. Taxes. Miserable interactions with internet providers.

I moved into my new house. It's pretty great. The move has wreaked havoc on my writing time table, however, and on my blog upkeep. Just getting back into the swing of around two thousand words a day. Sometimes even the right ones. Sometimes in the right order. Other times, not so much. But wrong words can be fun too.

Fortunately, in my time away, I've been spared a deluge of topics that are mind crushingly worthless, such as Jenner's genitals (does it matter? I'm not having sex with them), emerging political campaigns (does it matter? No matter what, one of them is going to screw me) and trending hashtags (it doesn't matter.).

Instead, I've been spending my days filled with moving things, accidentally stabbing sofas, trying not to antagonize my brilliant gorgeous and supremely forgiving wife who loves that sofa, and the plight of the lemming. And occasionally, actually managing to read and write.

They're not suicidal, you know. Lemmings. They're just prone to anxiety and if you scare them enough, you can make them stampede in extremely dangerous places.

Some wrong words on a wrong story instead of anything useful, however, are enclosed below. Feel free to skip ahead if you don't feel like reading a tragic story of love found, love lost, ambition and defecation. Any resemblance to my wife's life experience is unintentional* and not at all a real thing*.

The door creaks open on worn hinges, barely a sound disturbing the blackness contained. The room is empty, dark and cool. Vague box-like shapes form the few minimalist contents there-in, and the wash of light from the hallway illuminates only clean floor tiles and sterile white walls. She is alone. She hurriedly slips inside, a quiet anxiety fueling her steps. As her foot crosses the threshold the lights snap into life, taught with a pulsing fluorescent glow that makes everything seem dead and false, washed out, a simulacrum of life. The heavy wooden door softly groans shut behind her, letting out a firm, audible thud as it finds its place. A smile steals a sinuous path along her lips.

“Hellooooo!” She calls out, to no response. A totally vacant bathroom, one that has not been despoiled in the past fifteen minutes, or however long it takes the automatic lighting system to turn itself off. Jackpot.

            With a manic grin she spins around, her hands up in the air, all hips and legs, frenetically flailing her way through a dance she does not know and is pleasantly certain that no one has ever given a name. Her years of training as a dancer lower their head in shame.

            “Hit me baby, one more time!” Oh yes. She went there. The song may have been over ten years old, but fuck ‘em. A true classic never dies. Her smile splits open and surges into a laugh that echoes off the empty stalls and walls.

She flings open the handicap corner stall, wipes for a feverish few moments at the toilet seat with a spare piece of single-ply toilet paper and tosses it into the feminine hygiene receptacle, humming with haphazard enthusiasm along to the song. Even the hygiene box is empty except for the newly wrinkled scrap. College custodians hard at work. She adorns the door’s garment hook with her worn college book bag, packed to unforgiving capacity with worn college books. With a tug, her yoga pants and undergarments no longer restrain her and she plops down on the clean cold white.

She is alone in her sterile kingdom, seated on her porcelain throne, humming with deranged delight. The little wonders see us through. She relaxes, in no rush at all, easing into her processes when a mighty sound blasts across the bathroom.

“Snrrrrrrrrrrrrkgh!” 

It is something between a mighty groan and the fluid garbled inhalations of someone with an acute case of tuberculosis. Her humming stops instantly.

“Wha?” She manages. Waits. 

No sound returns to her but the dull echo of her voice. She peeks under the door. Nothing. No incriminating feet, no judgmental glimpse of boots aiming at her, turned in frowning disapproval at her conduct as someone gazes in to view her shame. No large hooves indicating a reasonable source of such a snorting bellow. She is forced to consider, with grim dread, that the sound had originated from herself, unfelt, unknown, and unwilled.

Back to ground zero on the relaxation process, she notes. Tentatively, she lowers her shoulders from their stressed, vulture hunch and drifts back toward contentment.

“Don’t you know? I still believe, still believe!” She sings to herself, but quieter, more reserved, bursting in with the final chorus line, not in words, but in humming once more. Surely more acceptable.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!” 

She catches herself on the toilet paper dispenser as she topples from the toilet seat, her need to utilize the toilet mercifully and instantaneously quenched.

“The fu-hell-shi-what?” She stammers out, rising to her feet and backing away into the corner, upsetting the toilet brush.

Then she hears it. It starts out low, and starts to grow. Not the Whos down in Whoville, however, no sir. A low, guttural, waxing rush, like waves against a beach. She ever so quietly eases open the door, as if silence now will conceal her. She creeps out, her soft shoes meeting the floor. She stops, looks down, and tugs up her yoga pants. Her eyes navigate the sliver separating the neighboring stall door from the stall foundation, peeking in, checking for any sneaky, hiding inhabitants or lurking, snorting serial killers. Whatever kind of person would commit such a sound. It takes her a moment to discern the tangle of hair and knees and drool from which the sound burst forth, a low, steadily rising, steadily wettening rush of air.

A tiny fellow student is perched on the toilet, open text book in her lap, pale legs bare but shrouded in her tangled messy hair. Her head dangles low against her shapeless chest, her mouth gapes, pooling drool on the open book. Our heroine, realizing she is no longer alone, feels her heart stammer in surprise. Perhaps she should wake the girl. Maybe she should check her vitals. She’s studied nursing for the last three years, perhaps the sleeping girl has stimulated her vagal nerve and passed out from the prodigious effort of pooping. From the unconscious, cavernous mouth a mighty, belching snore rips forth in a tremendous surge of sound and power that betrays its owner's diminutive size.

“SNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKGH!”

She takes a step back automatically. In near-reverence she creeps quietly, ever so carefully out the door, letting it slip shut behind her, back into the hallway, a revenant from the sleeping beast’s domain.

Hours later, she finds herself alone once more, driving her tiny blue Hyundai Accent with its forest of air fresheners and a spare pink stethoscope looped over the rear view mirror, howling out Britney Spears to hell and the heavens. There is a two second lull between songs on her CD (It’s not as if vintage Britney Spears hits the radio anymore, no chance of catching it there) which hearkens her back to an earlier time that day. 

She thinks of the messy tiny balled up girl sitting on a toilet, having quite possibly slept through her finals. Having quiet possibly had a brain aneurysm from the force of trying to pass her bowels and now was some necrotic terror waiting in an empty bathroom for the next falsely confident person to enter and plop down beside her.

“Ah, shit,” she shrugs, thrusting her fist up at the ceiling as she double taps rewind. “One more time!”

Insomniacs Anonymous

One need never buy alcohol again. There's a far cheaper alternative that requires only a little patience.

Not hooch, although that kind of fits the bill as well. Toss some apples in a plastic bag in the back of a toilet and you can home make your own jailhouse moonshine if you're willing to wait. 

Although technically, moonshine more frequently involves corn as an ingredient and tastes like rubbing alcohol, while I can only assume that apple whiskey tastes like a hint of rustic pome mixed with dysentery and regret. Of course either of those alternatives would be illegal on the moral grounds that the government cannot properly tax you for poisoning yourself. For your own safety, of course.

Find yourself not in the illegal substance trade but want to experience the same results?

Have a hankering for occasional euphoria? Blackouts? Temporary loss of brain function and balance? Slurred, fumbling words and occasional delusions that border on full-out hallucination? Want to bolster a defiance of social mores? Want to get into more car accidents, but with less guilt? 

Rhetorical questions, of course, because we *all* want that.

Sleep deprivation is the way to go. 

Also, it helps with creativity and makes most social events more bearable, keeps various mental maladies mitigated and makes jokes far more humorous. I'm not exactly a communal butterfly, and the larger the group, the more bolstering it takes. I'm pretty sloshed on it at the moment, so I apologize if I meander.

I'm off in a little town for my wife's sister's wedding. Big crowd, remote place. A lot of older folks, and religious ones of the more judgmental inclination too. Mutterings of hellfire and damnation make a curious backdrop to vivid greens, sticky heat, open water and blue skies. 

"Provincial" is an accurate description.

Helluva view though, and really quite peaceful.

Wedding is in a few hours and figured I could either write or sleep, so I'm writing. And, by the sleep--deprivation metaphor-- I suppose I'm pre-gaming as well. I am not designed for crowds.

Almost done the first draft of Wyte, a full length horror novel about a group of amateur, middle-aged adventurers who wish to escape a generally unfulfilling office life and add the Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia to the list of locations they've seen and conquered. They find themselves confronted with a nature far greater and more terrible than the one they understood, and a presence that is not only aware of them but happy to pursue and conquer them in turn.

Been working on a bunch of other projects too, but the straight-forwardness of Wyte has been incredibly fun to write, and I think it will be good to read, when done. Not as much humor as some of the projects, but a more classical aim at horror.

First draft is hardly the same thing as finished product, but it's progress. From then on, it'll take even more time and patience. Everything with writing does. Patience and a willingness to be entirely cheap. So screw the bars and expensive liquors that taste like the arse end of a hippo, those are only for the grossly wealthy and impatient. Wait a while, instead.

READING LIST: HORROR

I have previously noted an enthusiasm for horror books, movies, stories, and even the word "horror." It is a pretty word and has a nice phlegmatic sound to it. 

(Scary things)

In that vein, I decided to make a list of a few recommendations. I will attempt to avoid any sort of spoilers that could not be gleaned from the cover, name, or most basic plot summary.

Not listed in any particular order, they're all worth reading. I may extend the list if I come up with any new ones.

READING LIST:

The Ruins, Scott Smith

  

    Summary:

      Group of friends go into the Mexican wilderness and end up trapped in some ruins with something that is rather inclined toward ruining their vacation.

      This is not the best horror story I've read, but it's one of the most fun to read in all its grueling glory. Classic horror. Lovecraftian. The characters are beautifully crafted and the plot itself is a fun take on the "five go out" idea. Plus the antagonist is pleasingly malevolent. Plot holes and all, it's certainly worth reading. Movie was fine, but they kind of screwed up a few parts. Namely the characters. And the ending. 

Cujo, Stephen King

      Summary: 

      A massive dog goes rabid and attacks people.

         There are so many King potentials to mention (Carrie, Shining, Salem's Lot, Dead Zone if that counts as horror, Cell, the Stand etc) that it is hard to choose one. Chose Cujo because hot damn. It hits hard at the end and sticks with you throughout. King has his shortcomings, but when he delivers, he makes it count. 

Note: this is a less supernatural-based story than most of King's stuff.

         

The Cobra Event, Richard Preston

       Summary: 

       A bio-weapon is being prepped for deployment in New York City.

       The man is brilliant. Unlike most of the others, this is scary because of the real-world nature of it. Yes, it suffers from an agenda, but the agenda is pretty freaking scary in itself. Semi-thriller, but due to the horrific brutality of even chapter one, I have to say it's horror.

Haunted, Chuck Palahniuk

     Summary:

     A bunch of would-be writers tell the stories of their own flaws while competing for limelight.

     Hands down strongest impact a horror book has had on me. Not at all my favorite horror, but it will make you see the world in fifty shades of jade. Palahniuk puts such disgust and loathing for humanity that it seeps into your skin and makes your stomach turn. And research. Much research too. He's a helluva journalist when he's not scarring minds. "Guts" is the most famous part since it frequently makes people swoon (is swooning still a term?), but the rest just keeps digging deeper and deeper into the depravity that resides within us all. Maybe not in such extremes, but it's there. If you do read it, I would recommend you sit alone in a room and read part of it out loud to yourself. See how far you make it before you feel uncomfortable.

Dracula, Bram Stoker

     Summary: 

     Come on, you know what it's about.

     This is, oddly, my most hesitant entry on the list. It's an exceptional book with a magnitude of impact on the genre that is impressive, but it does have its short comings. It's tough to read, it's full of more latent and generally misogynistic sexual imagery than Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, and it's sometimes hard to really decide why you're rooting for some of the "good" guys. On the plus side it created one of the most iconic and awesome creatures, and it's just a damn good book. Genuinely creepy.

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

     Summary: 

     A lone man struggles to survive following the apocalypse. 

     One of my all time favorites. He is an exceptional writer, has a wickedly keen sense of what makes a good story, and IAL has one of the best reversal of expectations that I've seen. Everything he writes is drenched in bitterness, but it rings true to his worlds. Plus, he makes vampires seem... er... real? Or at least plausible. Yes, yes, the movie is cute (mostly because of Will Smith singing Bob Marley to a dog) but it has very little in common with the book. Different plot, characters, setting, morale and theme. Odd that Smith would do that. IAmRobot

And the immortal line: "Once I thought [birds] sang because everything was right with the world[...] I know now I was wrong. They sing because they’re feeble-minded."

John Dies at the End, David Wong (Jason Pargin)

      Summary: 

      I don't... I really cant sum this one up. It should be read. The closest I could get is: sentient drug screws with the user's dimensional ties, but that does it a disservice. It's so much more.

      I tentatively call this horror. My usual regimen of horror doesn't include laughing until it hurts, utter mind-savaging weirdness, or penis jokes. But in the immortal words of Robin Williams: "when in doubt, go for the dick joke." Cracked.com author keeps that terribly strange sense of humor running into the sequel too, all the while telling a gorefest horror that has some powerfully personal moments that are not at all humorous but stick with you.

Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton

     Summary:

     Man clones dinosaurs, opens dinosaur theme park, things go poorly for all involved.

     It's science fiction horror about dinosaurs. It's also startlingly impressive in Crichton's own particular way. You'll either love it or hate it. Yes there's a load of time spent on science, but it's worth reading. Yes there's a lot of time spent on potential morals that can be drawn from the story, but they're philosophically sound. And the story is amazing. 

    It is better than the movie, and that is an exceptional movie. The first movie, i mean. I've vomited spaghettio's that spattered into a better story than the second movie.

Honorable Mentions:

H.P. Lovecraft

Summary:

Things got pretty weird.

      Mostly wrote short stories, and the longer his stories run, the weaker they tend to be. Hard to list him for a specific entry without mentioning a bunch of other good horror short stories. Buy a collection, though. He's the Tolkien of horror. I'd personally recommend The Color out of Space, and Call of Cthulhu. Suffer through the dialogue.

INSULTS

You fornicator of mothers!

A dire insult. Supposedly. I would dare say that most fathers have managed such a feat if you ignore the tentative implications of incest that have sunk beneath the waves of time along with such Titanics as "stymphalist."

This is a public service announcement about the death of insults, of rudeness, of banal, casual cruelty. People claim that instant gratification is the hallmark of the masses today, but that's silly. That's been the moniker forever. Another aborted insult in lieu of a real observation.

The highest casualty of the times is insults.

The internet causes a lot of things, but one of its greatest crimes (and there are a pantheon of great and unwieldy crimes...) is the dearth of proper diction and conviction to malediction. Too many learn too young the simple, laziest sorts of insults.

To quote a few less-than-eloquent youtube enthusiast examples selected at random:

• "your virgin fags who think this ugly hag is hot lmao" 
• "bitch i'm a womyn in days world. open your eyes, only half off us jerk off to literally anything. your gross penis. fuck off." 

And my personal favorite, 

• "The clean dumbbutt roughly pulls dumbbutt's like this. Fart off, you're a stupidface."

Took about 5 minutes of research on a single video, made a few brief tweaks for formatting sake and to condense the last one, which was posted primarily in two word entries.

These are the insults of weary, distracted, low hanging fruit. I love and support rudeness. It is one of my truest hobbies and penchants. There is a powerful honesty to telling someone you don't like them and want to make their day worse, just as there is a powerful and easy defense of ignoring someone's insults because you do not respect them or their opinion. It's like magic, a battle of arcane incantations and mental defenses.

As with many forms of magic, it is endangered. The state of global mockery is unacceptable. When has it fallen from common conversation to call someone a brochity quim? Why not jumentous helminth? Why not excerebrose carnal byproduct?

Yes, some more colloquial vernacular insults have a glorious ring to them. Hearing my sweet, elegant wife shout "Cocksucker!" at the TV warms my foul, beastly little heart. Shitstain, lint-licking cootie queen, warthog-faced buffoon-- there undeniably ARE acceptable commonplace insults, simply because of the beautiful way they roll off the tongue. But dumbass? Not if you mean it as an actual insult meant to wound. No siree.

Call someone a fopdoodle. Or the unimpressive byproduct of a bowlegged whore whose only qualification for producing even such a loathsome example of humanity was an affinity catching the stray misspent sperm from passing truckers. Either one takes more thought, but what you spend is what you get.

Even simple adjectives. There are few greater insults than "Normal" or "Boring" or "Pathetic" if you make them ring true. Even simply looking slightly above someone's eyes and saying "To speak with you demeans me. I do not hear you." gets some pretty fantastic results. No need for yelling that someone is sexually active. Simply tell them truth of your opinion. If they are a coward, call them one. Have reasons and examples to support it. Offer to make a power point, or devise an illustrative play starring sock puppets.

The best part is, if you use an insult with which the recipient is unacquainted, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli resounds that great and glorious chime of "you're too stupid to understand the insult, but you know you've been insulted."

For how much more can man ask?

The reverse, sadly, is true for most slurs. As everyone's favorite N word (nerfherder, clearly) is bandied about, it makes the speaker seem like the window-licking, fetid scrapings of the stagnant scum that forms a skin across the shallowest parts of the gene pool. Use words that have real, abrasive substance. 

"Stupid" is better than "gay" because stupid has a direct and powerful meaning, while the other means a bunch of things, but mostly sounds like you're subtly inquiring about the sex object preference of the addressed while simultaneously announcing that you are indeed stupid.

Most of the -isms fall in this category. Is there some wiggle room? Sure, but if you believe it, you're still the human equivalent of the fecal slime that accumulates around the mouths of gas station toilets and cannot be removed with even the most ardent bleach and scrubbing.

Now, you say, surely these problems have existed before!

Yes. I'm aware. Shakespeare had his high points when he wrote sonnets, The Lion King, and the comedy about how dreadfully defective are the minds of horny teenagers, but such gems as "fat guts" and the dismal stream of penis-length insults are set solidly at his doorstep. Chaucer was a big fan of dropping a "C" word that I'm omitting because I think it would get me in trouble with the wife(although it was more of a "Q" back then. The problem is not new, even among the greats. But the prevalence of the problem has reached untold heights of ecstatic enthusiasm.

The solution? Simple. 

• Watch shows like Archer. Less Adam Sandler. Meditate carefully upon the nature of your dislike for your fellow man. 

• Stop watching pewdiepie. Go to https://www.reddit.com/r/insults and read. 

• Watch some classic videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSEYXWmEse8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHWEZ_IjcSk 

You will like the way you insult people. I guarantee it.

The summary: Don't just say "ass," insult with class. Sonuvabitchretardjerkpunksnotnosedgianttwerpscumbagdickheadassholebastardpenisbreath

ON NOT WRITING

Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night keep me from writing when I'm supposed to. No, oh no, I'm much more creative with my reasons for failure.

It starts out with a subtle cue of self doubt, a feeling of "what if I just... [anything else]" to avoid the feeling of inadequacy. So I indulge. I put it off. Small increments at first, and then longer and longer. I can write next hour. That'll be okay, right?

No. Will not.

The feeling of disgust at not writing is the perfect fertilizer, urging that self doubt into a unholy vegetable of man-eating, night-dissolving proportions as it feeds upon itself. And then it's 6 AM again and no progress has been made except for sullen drudgery of avoidance, disillusionment and general feelings of unworthiness. I can either stay up until noon and foul up the following day, or I can accept the failure for what it is.

Anything else can include... well... pretty much anything. I've watched movies, listened to music, read a sizable portion of Wikipedia. Reddit, games, email, you name it. I can recite numbers up through novemdecillions without any hesitation. I can tell you why the average phallus length of an aardvark is not available online. I have learned all sorts of things, useful and otherwise. I've sat and refreshed a browser, not going anywhere. At least when I cave in and read extra books, I can tell myself I'm doing something useful.

Slowly, however, doing things I like(or things from which I could conceivably derive neurotic satisfaction) no longer helps me escape. When writing works, it's such a rush, and most things I've listed there are--let's face it--boring. Mind killingly so. If it's not engaging, it's not a good escape, especially because when writing works, it's makes you feel like your mind is on fire, like electric throbbing through your entire body. If you'll overlook the double entendre.

Since such quasi-enjoyable pursuits are used up, I turn to things I dislike as a penance. I read the news. I make food. I read Youtube comments. I watch infomercials. I write and rewrite a sentence or two. I mentally claw and scratch at anything I've written. I reread old emails that have a special place of scalding in my heart. And then I sit and feel truly abominable.

And little by little I become so consumed with loathing that it's a bitterest mercy when the night draws to an end and the brainless morning birds begin singing... at which point the impending completion inevitably drives me into a frenzy of half-assed writing that I'll have to re-edit the following day.

Some of the biggest precursors to the failfests that occur every few weeks are:

• Too little sleep (I drool on my keyboard when i pass out on it. Apart from the drool spatters seeming vaguely modern art, it's not very effective... unless you want yet another 430 pages of "kkkkkkkkkkkk" inserted into the middle of a project from where my nose was pressed.)

• Too much sleep (I often get more creative as my mind decays into sleep deprivation. Too awake is good for planning, but not for delivery. Must run balance.)

• Games (FPS are the worst. The less creativity, the more issues they cause. Story driven is okay, except for the time sink angle.)

• Online waste (Obviously. Dear goodness the productivity increase when my Wifi is out...)

• Vacations (Terrible news. Never more than one day off from writing at a time, ideally, if that. Doesn't have to be the full 2k daily words, but at least 500.)

• Not writing (Sounds stupid, but it's true. Writing even the literary equivalent of feces still gets it flowing. Writing nothing just makes everything turn to stone)

• Guilt (Deadlines are good and lovely. Beating yourself up for failing them is fine. Feeling guilty about failing them long after the fact is pretty self-defeating.)

• Food (I don't like eating, but not eating does terrible things for the mind and body. Until I bypass the maudlin mastery of mortality, eating is a bit necessary and too often shirked.)

• Feeling out of shape (makes self loathing and self disgust so much easier.)

The weird thing is (while wasting my time on researching it) I started noticing how entirely consistent the problems are among writers. Which is a little depressing in and of itself, since it indicates there is no cure. That being said, doing the obvious responses to the precursors does seem to have some effect. So maybe I should try that on nights like these instead of writing self-indulgent blog posts.

But, as tonight has been a more or less complete waste and I'm chock full of bitterness I'm out to go burn a CVS down--er... pick up my wife from the city. Sorry, my inner Baltimorean is showing. I can at least hope this blog entry will guilt trip me into writing tomorrow. 

HORROR

What do spiders, clowns and high places have in common? They're goddamn terrifying.

In all the best ways.

Not to everyone, mind you, but it's a bit of a theme.

Bot fly larvae burrowing up under your skin, wriggling, throbbing pale white grubs the size of half-dollars. You can see them moving under your skins, twisting and turning like monstrous pimples, filled with so much more than pus. True story.

Creeping legs crawling over you while you fade toward sleep, falling through that twilight of consciousness. The prickling across your skin as sharp feet pierce and tease over bare skin. Knowing it’s happening, feeling it, but being unable to stir toward consciousness to brush them away as they decide whether to start burrowing, or biting, or exploring a way to some unexpected orifice where to crawl inside. Think on it hard enough and your skin will tingle.

The top fears are fairly consistently rated as:

          Public display

          Dark

          Failure

          Dying

          Heights

          Flying

          Spiders

          Spatial fears (tightly enclosed or wide open).

No particular order. I could list on and on.

They give you chills and shivers and you think about all the horrible concepts of that something that is waiting for you, grinning that manic, alien grin. It's fun. And only occasionally crippling paranoia. Not always rational fears, but the knowledge they are irrational is what changes it from harrowing to a thrill.

That's the fun bit of fear. A scenario that is both unlikely and awful is fun to read.

The fun of horror comes when one of those irrational masks is settled atop a very rational fear, or at least a very rational truth.

• In Cujo (Stephen King), the rabid dog was a fun face to the conclusion that monsters are very real, and “it can’t happen to me or mine” is a lie.

• In The Ruins(Scott Smith it was malevolent Brussels sprouts. And the helplessness of inescapable confusion and despair and death.

• In Dracula(Bram Stoker) it was Thoreau’s attempt to establish the raw essence of American culture. Or wait… wrong book. But underneath Stoker’s vampire was the desperation of confronting something that is not understood, and that even the steadfast are susceptible to seductions. Stoker was working through some fears of female-equality too.

No one wants to read pure real horror. It's not fun. It's awful. It's the phone call that your child just died in a car accident, the end. Or that you have some completely unremarkable but utterly fatal disease, or that you can’t pay your bills and you're going to get evicted, or you get in an accident and lose your license or your wife leaves you because she realizes that she shares that same dismal opinion of you that you've hidden in your own heart but believe in far more devoutly than any priest of any religion. That awful lurch, the drop just at the top of your throat that makes it hurt to swallow. The dizziness, the vague feeling of detachment that throbs in waves punctuated by the simple underlying horrible truth that worlds are easily shattered and you can't go back and stop IT before IT happened, because time is too late and your one life is horribly disfigured beyond repair.

It's too much to look at it head on.

Stephen King did not want to market Pet Semetary. Understandably. At the risk of spoiling, he wrote into it the death of his own son in a very realistic and plausible way. He said it wasn't fun, and that he felt it was just horrible. I personally think it's a pretty good book. But then again, it involves necromancy rites and Indian burial grounds and all that fun stuff dressed over the skeletal core of "if my son died, I'd risk damning myself and dooming anyone I know to try to bring him back. And sons do die."

It’s a heavily recurring theme in King’s work, at least as common as the perils of being a writer in Maine.

Not all things have to be so direct, of course.

Zombies, vampires, ghouls and ghosts.

• I Am Legend(Richard Matheson) is about vampires. Not in the Twilight estrogen-drenched sparkle-fest sort of way, nor even in a Stoker-ian sense of the supernatural, but in a way that attempts to conform to established scientific principles. Underneath it all, the concept that savagery is a manner of perspective and that loneliness/individuality is an easy background to make someone seem a monster.

• John Dies at the End(Jason Pargin, alias David Wong) is humorous horror about... that's a tough one to summarize, but the underlying constant is the constant, unremarked cruelty of the world contrasted against some pretty fantastically remarkable circumstances.

I could list on and on.

Chuck Palahniuk(Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby) is probably one of the best horror writers in my mind, but he is not at all the most fun to read. His brand of horror bypasses much of the outer fun-fear, or he purposely puts one so outlandish that the reader is heavily conscious of it being implausible. He then barrages the horrible internal truths at the reader until you feel like you're going to be sick (and in some cases, people have been known to literally pass up and/or vomit during his readings.). Palahniuk has no patience for foreplay. He may get the real work done, but he does not pretty it up to help it go down more easily.

It’s all a balance.

Serial killers, home invasions, satanic rites.

It's the same thing as roller coasters, or sky diving, but for your mind. You experience the instinctive reaction to lethal speed and uncontrollable space, impending doom as you hurtle through impossible conditions. You roll the dice and delight in the sensation that it all could go wrong, that it might go wrong, that something similar has probably gone terribly wrong for someone else. The face story is the plane and parachute, the roller coaster. The falling is real.

It’s far less fun to skydive without a parachute. Thrilling, sure, but not exactly a bumper crop of hilarity.

Personally I'm afraid of all sorts of things. I’m not an anxious person, but there’s more to fear than screaming and hiding. I do not like heights, or clowns. I do not like camel spiders or large things moving just below the surface of water. I don’t like crowds or people touching me. I do not like full body suits that hide the wearer entirely. Sorry, furries.

I do not like raw meat, the knowledge of it rotting, slippery and wet as I touch it, slimy with a film of digesting bacteria. And of course, I do not like the feeling of foreign things moving inside me, infesting and wriggling. I do not like certain irregular patterns. Think that sounds silly? Look up trypophobia. See if you keep laughing. And sometimes ventriloquist dummies. Because ventriloquist dummies.

But all of those are just fun faces to the real fears.

The unreliability of my own mind. The dark, monstrous thoughts. Failing even at things I should be able to easily do because the shortcoming lies not in the skills, but in me. Being unable to express things. That I’ll grow old and weak and withered and I’ll have no fire, no drive, no purpose. That my opinion about myself that comes crashing in on those dark and bitter nights was right all along. That other people will be able to read my mind and know the horrible truths I've long since discovered about myself.

I could list on and on.

Universal fears that are all the more horrible because when you peek under the bed to say “Ah! No homicidal clown there today!” you see them peeking back at you with a mocking, toothy smile and you realize that the most dreadful monster you can barely imagine has nothing on the real fears that confront you in your life. 

Which, of course, is why I like to read horror. Because the world is a scary place.

So, 

Of what are you afraid?

P.S. If you are a horror movie fan, I’d heavily HEAVILY recommend watching the movie “Babadook” as it’s one of the better horror movies I’ve seen with a very interesting underlying truth.

HOUSE

A lit window at night spills light out beyond, and all that light makes it very easy to forget that darkness too spills in. Not a deliberate darkness, no overly dramatic caricature of shadow painted against the floor or roiling cloud of blackness curling in like mist, but an intrusion of awareness, a watching from beyond.

Looking out, you cannot clearly see it either, for the light makes a mirror out of glass when you're on the inside looking out. You see only yourself, distorted and pallid and murky, as through water. It's often easy to believe you're alone, that there's no invisible face pressing close, peering in, the vague stirring in your reflection's eyes.

If it had hands, there'd be prints against the glass. If it breathed, it'd leave a stain of fog. But it does not breathe and it has no use for hands. It simply watches, pressing close, invading and drinking in your presence, learning you, grinning coldly at the simple naivete of your perceived privacy, laughing you to scorn as it seeps in, little by little toward the beckoning light. The glass grows cold, feels so slick it's almost wet with the watchers drooling anticipation. To see out, to look for it, you must stand very close and look through your own shadow, into its eyes. And sooner or later it inevitably will slip past the threshold and creep a fragment of itself into even the most mundane of households.

So you put up blinds and shutters, but that is futility in itself. The slivers peeking out are still slivers peeking in, and that is all it takes. It can be very patient, pressed up against the glass beyond. It creaks along the floorboards. It groans like the sound of a settling house. It's easy--very easy, even--to convince oneself there's nothing out there, but to do so is a grave misstep, because glass has been known to crack...

Which is essentially why I don't terribly like social media websites. Too many opportunities for folks to come peeking in, unseen, and impossible to really keep them out. The irony of course, is that this is all written in a blog, which is more or less like a Ouija board, firing out a beckon call to those who dwell beyond.

It's also why I don't like glass doors on a house. It's one thing for a window, a window is for looking, but a door is made for entering, and certain things should not be let in.

All of which would seem like fairly silly verbal meanderings, as I live in an apartment characterized most eloquently by the word "shabby" or perhaps a somewhat nasal sigh. The front door is shared with the other units, and the door to my apartment is a slab of brown-painted metal. I certainly needn't worry about the light permeability of my doors. 

But not for long! I've bought a house.

It is a good house. I quite like it. If it were a pancake, I would likely eat it. If it were a person, I would shake its hand quite warmly. And most likely not eat it, unless I were terrifically hungry and had no better options. I have no desire to follow in the footsteps of Tom Dudley and earn myself a death sentence for eating the cabin boy just a couple days before being rescued, but I suppose the humor in such a sentence is better than starvation.

So. No longer to dwell in the apartment in hell, no longer to linger and lay under the spell of misery, drug use and domestic ire that neighbors display (and on occasion, gunfire). The pounding on ceiling, on walls, and on floor shall certain continue! But I'll hear them no more. I'll have room to raise a child or pet, and curl up comfy behind walls, yard, and debt.

Don't get me wrong, I love the apartment. It's pretty grand. It's cheery and bright and it's home. But between the mice I've had to beat to death, the roaches I've had to beat to death, the neighbors who occasionally beat each other to near-death, the lustily amorous adventures of the neighbors who live above us (they've managed to work sex into a sort of relay race-style scramble of sprinting across the apartment and fornicating at various locations, with a ferocity that I can only call admirable), the carbon monoxide events and the constant haze of mold and pot smoke, I'll be happy to move elsewhere too. I'll finally have an office. A basement. And a reason to worry about glass doors.

Also: if anyone is interested in helping as a beta reader, please feel free to contact me at DanielGJFranklin@gmail.com. Neither of the projects are fully prepped for such a task yet, but i'm hoping to break them into a few segments and ask casual readers for thoughts on a few particular issues before far too long.

Shame (1)

An English professor I know and with whom I occasionally speak encouraged everyone to write the most shameful things they could, because if it is embarrassing to you, it's probably fairly interesting to others, and people will want to read it.

It's also extremely volatile and unsettling, but omelettes and eggs and such.

My name is Daniel Franklin, and I am a ______. Welcome to _______s Anonymous. Take your seat with the others. I think it's when I decided I wanted to write, no matter who read it. I have such dirty things to say, and the saying is empowering.

You take that awful filthy secret and come right out and say it. BAM, out in the open, no holds barred and watch the reader cringe in sublime and delighted revulsion. It's like stepping off a building. Having stepped off a building, I am entitled to the cliche analogy. Read Chuck Palahniuk. It's juicy and wet and tantalizing, raw and fresh and ready to be consumed.

It's also a death knell for relations, private and public, but nothing risked means nothing gained and such.

A minor example:

_______________

I remember the last time I wet the bed. 

It's really the only time I can remember doing it. I was probably about 6 years old, give or take, and I remember it with naked clarity. I was at a hunting lodge in West Virginian with my father, grandfather and two brothers. We didn't hunt, mind you. We just were out in the wilderness doing our thing. I never really understood it, but more and more I have begun to suspect it was as much a vacation for my mother as it was a situation of bonding, which I also never really understood as I never really bonded with anything terribly well throughout my childhood. I was a tiny, scrawny, cheery thing (believe it or not, I really was).

It wasn't much of a lodge, certainly nothing fancy. It was a mostly wooden building. It smelled like wet leaves and wet hair. There was an age-yellowed plastic gallon jug flipped upside down and cut in half attached to a wall in some cramped, pipe filled closet that worked as a urinal. There was an outhouse for if you had to defecate, but I eternally swore to myself I would never go out there after dark. There was a kitchen and table and chairs and a couch and a television where we'd watch the same movies every year that we went. It plays in my memory like a dream that repeats and repeats. We all slept in the same room, a cramped room with beds lining every wall, one bunk bed where my father and grandfather slept.

During the drive down, I drank a 20 ounce bottle of mountain dew. We got there late at night, or at least late enough that it was well after dark. We ate dinner on the way at some rustic, rural diner. Before long went we all went to bed. I used the urinal, but apparently it wasn't enough because I woke up in the dark, laying on my back, the sky just beginning to shift as the first emissary rays of morning light fumbled at the dirty windows.

My bed was soaked, three circles of dripping humiliation. I must have rolled while I peed. The back of my underwear was the wettest by far, something I've always found odd, considering my particular anatomy.

I remember my heart pounding as I snuck through the room in just a t-shirt, shedding my underwear, tighty whities that I knew were now *almost* white, even though in the darkness I couldn't clearly tell. I remember the sounds of the others snoring. I remember slipping the incriminating articles into the dirty laundry, and how little dirty laundry there was. It was our first night there, of course there was only things people had worn the day before. The dirty laundry was in a paper grocery bag, from Food Lion, and I pulled out as much as i could, pushing the evidence down near the bottom. Not on the bottom itself, I didn't want the wetness to seep through the bag, but out of sight. If at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence you failed. Even as a child I was well designed for lying.

I know the hunting lodge smelled like leaves and hair, but when I remember the hunting lodge, I first think of the smell of piss, of those awful three damp patches, of that awful catch in my throat, the awful knowledge that my shame was exposed and painted for everyone to see. It was almost a high; heart-pounding, mind-devouring.

For years I slept with my hand shoved down the front of my pants, cradling myself, telling myself that if my hand were there, the wetness would wake me. That I could stop myself, that I could fix it before it happened again. It still helps me sleep when all else fails. I still don't care much for mountain dew and I can go days without peeing. Not that I'm particularly worried about wetting the bed these days, mind you. I should have a good number of decades before I start up on those shenanigans, and even if not, it's a problem that can be bypassed easily.

________

At the time, it was foul as cowardice, as criminality, as cruelty. It was an admission of a lack of control. It was one of the more horrid things in my life at that point. In retrospect I was laughably innocent. Urination is certainly not a big deal. I have much better shames now, and of that you can be sure. 

Even a lesser shame though, calls for reading. Nothing magnificent, that story told. A spark of interest, but no real electricity. You'd be reading a lot slower, hanging on my every word, if I announced I was a murderer or a pedophile or a whore or told you in detail about erectile dysfunction or how it feels to cut an animal open with a knife or the time I did that thing with you know what to you know who. And no one else ever knew, prior to this revelation.

These are what you'd want to read. Not all of them are all that bad, but they carry that stain of social deviance that perks and piques. Not all of them are true either, mind you. I'm not that interesting. Probably. But are they all false? You have to wonder. A game, then. I played it with my wife's family a while back, and it's fascinating. Truth, truth, lie. Tell three things, make one false. Raise the stakes each time by telling more and more dire truths until someone folds.

Maybe I should choose a few of the higher shames and throw them here, at the risk of horrifying the wife. At least a few Truth-Truth-Lies.

Think of your most staining moment, of the worst thing you've done. The worst lies you've told, the worst things you've seen, and sought, and all the lies you tell yourself to build a barrier between them and the truth. Maybe others know them, maybe they don't. The secrets you bury and pile time and dirt and stone on top of, but you know beneath it they still lie rotting without diminishing, lie festering with disease, and on top of it nothing grows. Nothing ever will. 

They're the moments that will play back through you as you lay on your deathbed, before the dark.

Now go into the bathroom, or somewhere quiet and private with a mirror. Look in the mirror, look yourself in the eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Look at yourself until you seem almost alien, almost like another's face looking back, and say that shameful creed. Recite them in a list to yourself. Hear them echo in your mind and hear the awful flat way they sound when they fall out from dry lips, a pale imitation of their internal, infernal heat.

It's also pretty catastrophic to the self esteem and such, true... but that professor knows his stuff. That's what to write. To God above, if someone were passing by the door and listening, you know they'd listen hard.