Fear as a Tonic for Madness
Somewhere deep within some of us there are things we mustn’t speak of. Notions, perhaps we might call them. Others: they insist on fresher terms, sharper clips of popping language because, well, why not?
What are the words, you ask? Oh, I could never say, I’m afraid. Not at least the words others might apply to themselves. I mean, if there is one thing the last few years ought to have taught us it has to be the fact that words matter. Terms and phrases mean something now, in ways they didn’t before. People have taken to the streets of language in ways once reserved for storming actual villages and farms, surrounding them with burning torches and mob energy and the thunderous rise of sharpened pitchforks/ in unison /at dawn.
But what I can tell you is what my own inner dialogue reveals. I have, after all, been talking to myself nearly all of my life, going back nearly five decades at this point. And through all of that I have obviously earned insights into how I see myself, especially when it comes to the potential for, how might we put it… darkness?
Were my sadnesses and blues to effervesce, alchemize, become a something grander than the sum of its parts, what would I look like? How would I materialize? Where would you find me? And on that note, why would you even look for me to begin with?
Do you ever ponder these things? Especially in this season, as Halloween looms?
I do. Not for any single takeaway, I suspect, but more because I long to connect with an underbelly of sorts. Yes, yes, yes, I am nothing special. And yes, of course, my magic powers, my ability to do anything out of the norm, anything possibly deemed witchy or spooky or magic or whatever/ I possess nothing of the sort. I cannot fly and my strength is minimal. The full moon makes me irritable and suspicious, yet I have never found myself alone in the forest with hot blood in my teeth or anything like that.
My dreams are all quirky/ some are delightful/ others weird. Never do they take me towards a darker path. I haven’t killed many people in the middle of my sleep. A few? Well, who knows? But nothing I would write home about, honestly. More often than not I see myself dressed as ET and the wind is blowing harsh from the north as my brother dressed as Michel Jackson and my Mom dressed as a pirate both walk just ahead of me, dead leaves swirling wild up about their bodies in sudden rising gusts, the sweet scent of the cool evening like a spiced wafer jammed up into my face like a clay pigeon shot into my mouth.
So where do I enter into this whole Halloween question as someone who has found great worth in loving the auras of it all yet seems, quite simply, to lack any and all supernatural powers. I ooze no real horror but that of an average anxious middle aged dad. People don’t run from me when I come around the corner. In fact, I almost run into this one same Amish dude almost every day after I come out of the post office and he only ever flinches a little bit and says, “Helloooo” in his thick Dutch way, as the piss runs down my leg because: you guessed it: I jump in absolute fear every time we nearly collide even though it happens all the time.
Where is my darkness then?
Where does it hide? Where does it lurk? I must have it, no? We all do, I’m sure of it. For me, I believe it might be down in my blue sad bones, a slash of shadow from behind my ribs/ a silvery flit of blade from the shade ‘round my spine.
Am I evil?
How do we answer that? How do I answer that? I don’t feel evil, but sometimes I suspect that no one who is evil, or scary, or overwhelmingly characterized by making other people, mere mortals if you will, shit the pants off of their flabby legs, even realizes that they are who they are. Maybe there is madness attached to cruelty. It could be that there are other types of madness too, better kinds maybe, kinds that allow us to imagine ourselves as indescribably horrific/ macabre/ monstrous, even/ and yet we never come close to living it out. To acting it out in real time.
Well, hopefully not.
Some do, it’s true. Many either choose/ or are chosen by/ a powerful alternate to so-called civility. And I must admit: we do find such folks uniquely attractive in our own twisted ways, now, don’t we? Our serial killer fixation is this year’s vampire fetish/ this era’s witch hunt across the land. It’s just that we are lazy and drunk instead of crazy and drunk like people used to be. So we let the Netflix guide our sinister fantasies as we snack our lives away to the song of someone else’s utter insanity.
Meanwhile, out in the yard, there are ghosts floating above your gas grill. They are dripping waxy piss down on your Subaru under the cover of night. It isn’t tree sap, you pigheaded fool. Everywhere you look these days, Halloween, she’s calling you. In the swift clouds passing over the moon, in the shine of the stars on the river ‘neath the bridge. There is something watching us from a distance.
Can you feel it yet at all?
If you can, I understand you.
But if you can’t, we grow apart.
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