Beautiful People

Up along Oregon's coastal highway, 101, there's an artists community called Canon Beach. I was there once, on a tourist's romp along the Pacific Ocean doing a ride from Tillamook, Astoria to Portland. We had stopped at Canon to check it out, poke around and see what we could see as I was curious. Walking around I wanted to step inside one of those galleries to see just what these artists were doing. Simple enough. Inside the gallery were paintings of seals on the beach, seals on rocks, seals in the water, seals on docks, seals back-lit by sunsets...all selling for $5,000+ each. One painting was for $30,000.

“Paintings of seals...numerous ones...all for sale...for the price of a car.” I thought to myself. I'd thought the subject matter might have been varied some what more. There is more to the Oregon coast besides seals. I guess seals sell.

In order to enter the gallery, I had walked along a pathway that led to an earthy grotto overgrown with ivy. On a stone bench, sat two people, but not just any two people. I had to stare as any tourist would stare. It's rude but there are times when you see something in real life and you have to take it all in. On this bench were a couple. They both had each hair in place, were wearing the latest clothing out of LA and sported RayBans nicely hanging from their shirt collars. One was holding a glass of Pinot Noir haphazardly, nearly spilling onto the gravel. Both were impeccably tanned. Their attitudes said, “I'm so rich and bored and I still don't care.” I instinctively knew w/o having to be told these two were California Beautiful People. I had read, seen on TV and heard about this breed, but never in my life had I witnessed it.

Those two were that perfect. It's like seeing a model or an advertisement and realizing for a bit, none of it was airbrushed at all. There are people who do look like this w/o any effort from Adobe Photoshop.

**

There are Beautiful People everywhere really, in every town, state or county. Perhaps not as tweezed as well as one from LA that I saw but they are “good enough.” Tonight I got to watch a couple of local types blow their image in a proper, quiet way so as not to draw attention. Too late, I saw it.

The guy is an acquaintance, she a distant one. The look like they belong together. They both had that Prom Queen/Quarterback look to them. That these two were together was ordained when time began. Not only that, but their lives seemed a bit like Camelot. He an up an coming young exec at a biotech firm and she, a model who's getting more and more attention from the NYC modeling agencies. She's stunning. She was naturally anorexic, exotic and had that skin that only 14 year girls olds have. Their lives seemed that there was nowhere to go but up.

Right looks, right jobs, right cars and right everything else. It made some around me jealous as I heard some comments. They weren't regulars at Chardonnay's in Seekonk but they were there enough to have made an impression. They were there enough. The girls hated the Golden Girl's looks and the guys were jealous of the Golden Boy's silly career advancement as he was promoted two ranks above his position in what seemed a short time.

Nothing changes, does it? High school never ends.

Anyway, while outside in the parking lot as a few others I know are talking, I tune into another conversation a few feet away from me. I am so bad at that, other's private lives are MY business! I hear Golden Girl lament to another the fact that her Golden Boy had kissed another at a party not too long ago at Capriccios. She brushed it off as politically correct as she could have, not wanting to seem like the distrusting type, but the fact she kept talking about it for so long was suspect. It did bother her. What was also telling was that I noticed she had spent the better part of night alone, leaning against a wall or at an empty table, texting away. Golden Boy was bouncing from group to group, chatting it up and the girls he palled around with did their best to engage him.

“Christ, even them.” I thought. Regular life intrudes into this storybook and fucks it up. Regular ol' human nature can't seem to reach the myth of Camelot.

By the end of the night, Golden Boy was playing with the boys around a video game and ignoring the over zealous girls that were orbiting him and Golden girl? I saw her leave, by herself, to her car and then drove off towards Rehoboth.

Beautiful people...even them. I have to wonder about all the effort that's put into maintaining that image when, in the end, regular,boring human nature seems to slam shut that Storybook.

Cannon Beach, with Haystack rock. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

I never read the above mentioned book. However, I couldn't escape it if I watched PBS during one of their fund-raising campaigns in the early 90's. This book was another in a long line of self help books that sprung from the Human Potential Movement that came out of California in the late 60's and especially during the '70's. Think of Esalen  again, which I spoke of in the past. In it, the author Robert Fulghum tries to recapture and apply the simplicity of a child and use those early memories and lessons to his current life. Whether it works or not is up to debate, what was surprising were the book sales. Hell, any self-help book in the 70's was a best seller. Why? Because many people are unhappy with life and were searching.

That says something...

If you read this blog, you'll find it dripping with sarcasm and cynicism. It's my defense against a world of bullshit and danger. It's too bad that those words have such a negative connotation. To be cynical implies you've lost that innocence and belief that people, that life in general is good. Yeah, well, if you take a black and white attitude about these things, cynicism can be a stance that can be taken much too far. Then again, taking a Happy Horseshit, 100% everything's perfect view on the world is just as silly. You apply either view in doses, as needed. There was a guy, Timothy Treadwell, who was an environmentalist, bear lover and naturalist who set out in deep woods Alaska to become a friend of the bears, to protect them and understand their nature. Well, the bears didn't give a shit about his political leanings or motivations and ate him for supper eventually. That's an example of taking it a bit too far, the reality of the world won't support your view.

What did I learn in kindergarten? Ahhh...not all those lessons were Disney-ish. If fact, kindergarten was a bit of a shocker to me. Here's what I also learned besides fingerprinting, cutting construction paper and making a new best friend in Johnny Burnash, who liked to color his shirts with crayons.

People lie...a a lot. People steal...a lot. Teachers were full of shit...a a lot. Teachers pick and chose their favorites and openly disliked others...a lot. Kids, even at five years of age, form a social hierarchy and you find out just where you're pigeonholed. God forbid you try to move from your particular position on that ladder of popularity as everyone else there will made damn sure you stay put. I also came to the conclusion girls were evil.

Since I never had any sisters and there were few girls in our neighborhood to being with, I found out just how socially adept girls are by the time they reach kindergarten. Hell, we boys were always behind on that score. I had little experience with girls so they have the advantage on me. The evil power girls had I found was their ability to lie like rugs and get away with it.

I won't name her so let's call her Anna H. which is damn close.

As five year old boys, we were rambunctious, whether it be in backyards or the classrooms. Johnny Burnash and I found that if you threw a Superball really hard against the wall of the classroom, it would bounce around the room like a sub-atomic particle in an atomic collider. This is funny as hell to young boys. Of course, you do this when the teacher is out of the room.

Anna H was one of those goody-good girls who wore dresses, a blond ponytail and was a professional teacher's pet. She also owned the Head Cheerleader Alpha Female spot amongst the girls (God, how they start early!). Think of Nelly Olson from Little House on the Prairie. Cute, perky and full of venom.

John and I were carried away by the fun of whipping that ball around the classroom when the teacher comes back, catching us. Amazingly on cue, Anna H. then starts to cry out, holding her eye claiming that I, whipped the ball right at her face. Of course, Anna being a girl, the teacher took her word as gospel truth. However, I swear on a stack of Bibles that I never did it.

“HOW DARE YOU HIT A GIRL” I was admonished by the teacher.

“But, but, but, but...” I stammered.

“He hit me! He hit me!” Anna continues to cry out in the background.

I stood there, completely flabbergasted. I never had come across such lying, such accusations in my five years of life. I was knocked off my “game” and my failure to come up with a decent defense made me look guilty as hell. I was just plain shocked.

The teacher confiscates Johnny's ball and condemns us to opposite corners of the room to stand, facing in. I kept turning around, looking at Anna, in amazement. “How could you lie like that? What did I ever do to you?” “What the hell just happened?” I thought.

“Let me see dear, let me look at your eye...Oh...you'll be alright...There's no marks...no swelling.” the teacher says to Anna. Of course there's no marks. No ball had ever hit it.

Lesson # 543.b. Watch out for chameleon type girls.

I learned a lot about life in those short nine months in kindergarten, most of it political. There was a Who's Who and I learned quick on how that game was played, which was mostly ugly. What strikes me, now that I have perspective, was that the teachers themselves clearly were playing it as well. Ah well, that's another lesson.

I'm guessing that's the birthplace of my cynicism, kindergarten.

**

There's another self help book out there, but most haven't heard of it as it isn't about any Happy Place. It's called, “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking” by Julie Norem. She makes the same statement I've made to people for years when it comes to cynicism. Before you go off on a new venture, you first must locate all the potholes, barbed wire and land mines that life loves to throw in your way. If you can stay clear of those while you pursue your goal, your chances at a happier success increase.

I was never in the Boy scouts but I guess I found my own version of, “Be Prepared.”

I've seen this a million times, in other's lives, who charge headlong after some happy goal only to tear right over a cliff. And afterwards, they wonder why their life suddenly sucks now. I really wondered how they could never see why? I guess they get overly excited at some new endeavor and, giddy with happiness and free abandon, they stampede to that goal...till you hear that loud smack of them hitting a brick wall.

“Shit...they did it again.” I've thought.

To be fair, I've seen people whose lives were so full of crap that any good luck that came near them, they ran toward it, lest it get away. How much crap was of their own creation I can't say, but a good amount of bad luck seems to follow. Then one day a nice fat piece of fortune appears and they blindly fly towards it, only to trip and fall. It's like they are on the carousel and lean too far out to grab that ring, only to be beaned by a supporting I-beam they didn't see coming.

I tread carefully in life, mostly with new, major things I've never tried. I know my learning curve and initially, it's loaded with mistakes. Why make lethal ones if you can avoid it? I start out in the shallow end of the pool precisely because I know that some things in live can upend you damn fast. Once I get some experience in me, then it's time to try the deep end. That's how I learned to swim in the ocean, at five, starting out in waist deep water.

You learn a lot at five..don't you?

Brown Rice

“Fundamentally, there's just one reason why I left that commune.”

“Which was?” I ask.

“I got sick of eating brown rice every.goddamn.day.”

My friend, for a lark, decided to live in a Berkeley commune in the early 70's when the were popular. He had been ousted from his professor's job in San Diego and decided to drift up north to see what could be had there. He found a small commune and joined it. What he didn't know was that the commune next door, the Peking Man House, was occupied by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the same people who kidnapped Patty Hearst and gave the cops a surprise when they were finally busted with a huge shoot out. The SLA had used automatic weapons for that one. The LAPD, up until then, had never come up against anything like it. My friend had split the whole commune scene before the SLA got that active, though he did become friends with Mizmoon Soltysik, a waif-like and diaphanous hippy chick who also was apparently good with M2 carbines. She sold baubles and the such near the University of California, Berkeley to make a living. In the end, she was shooting up the LAPD from a barricade and died eventually after the police burned the house to the ground.

“It's too bad, she was probably the nicest one of the bunch, if you can call revolutionaries 'nice.'” he adds.

He said here's how the commune worked. The costs there were to be shared equally and the idea was that since the costs were spread out, everyone could use their copious free time to engage in what they wanted. Some spent time on their artwork, others, like Miss Lucy, spent her time making more money by being an underaged whore to wealthy Marin county businessmen. She may have been 16 while living at the commune. Marybeth, who was from Massachusetts as well as B. spent her time trying every latest fad in psychotherapy in order to fix herself. “Marybeth's day could be completely ruined if she broke her shoelace.” He tells me. “But on the whole, she was a decent person, just trying to fix whatever it was that broke her when she was a little girl.” He also tells me there was a guy who lived in the front parlor who had finger cymbals and clanged them while chanting “Ommmmm” for hours on end.

Since few of the hippy members worked enough to gain enough money, most had welfare checks to supplement their income. The whole commune would then pool their cash and send one of them off to buy food for the week. The cheapest staple they could purchase was, brown rice.

“I'll never eat another grain of fuckin' brown rice again” B tells me. It was the daily staple in the commune and he tried, again and again, to get them to add anything, something, to the rice in order to change up it's flavor. As the cooking duties rotated among the members, he occasionally would be in charge and try to make an Italian style rissoto with it, to the joy of the whole house. For once, rice wasn't boring. “Oh, that and goddamn lentils...I hate lentils now.” he adds.

He had had his fill after a while at the commune and returned to Massachusetts to start another job teaching. Not too long later, the SLA in the house next door was shooting people and kidnapping. He said on his way back, he stopped at Urbana/Champaign to teach and join another commune there, as his way back to Massachusetts was of the “long and circuitous route.” But that's when it started to all change he tells me.

The Flower Children of the 60's were harmless. Their goals were lofty and generally easy to get along with, but as this whole thing matured and morphed, it attracted an ugly element he tells me. The drugs the hippies and such enjoyed weren't the type to make you violent nor attract those who were. Also, the black market that provided it wasn't filled with bastards. That changed when heroin showed up.

“While at Urbana/Champaign, that's when I started seeing heroin...and the criminal types who then started to hang around or join these communes. I'd get some very ugly vibes off of some of the people there...I knew it was time to move on. When I started seeing thefts and weapons...that was it.”

**

Up until a few years ago, I had no idea that there were communes much, much earlier than the 60's. I had learned about Utopian towns that were tried in the US, in response to the shit mill towns the Industrialists created for their factory systems. These utopioan towns seemed more attuned to improving the lives of labor. The idea that a commune (back then) was for giving you tons of free time to chase after whatever it was that floated your boat was new to me. Then I found out about Brook Farm in Wext Roxbury, MA which was started in 1840.

Brook Farm was just that. If you could spread the work around equally, pay everyone equally, then the free time created could be spent on better things besides having to grovel to put a roof over your head. The first tenants engaged in lofty arts, literature and the sciences. The women there were treated with equality and they too could engage in whatever it was they wanted too. For a little while, it worked.

The problem was that there was no organization, no real division of labor and the farm went to hell pretty rapidly. You have to plow, plant, weed and harvest crops and that takes a ton of labor and time. When you don't organize it, guess what happens? No crops bearing anything worth selling in the marketplace.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one time member. He blew it off when he realized Brook Farm would provide no real money to start his life with his new wife. The idea of sweating or freezing your ass off in the fields for crap pay was abhorrent to him.

“...Hawthorne, not only tired of the high minded talk among the residents, he had found also labor on the farm, milking cows, chopping hay, shoveling manure, hoeing vegetables, nearly unbearable. After five months of it, he had fled back to a rooming house in Boston, losing his initial investment in the escape. In his notes about Brook Farm he said: 'It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap or in a furrow of the field just as well under a pile of money. Even my custom house experience was not such a thralldom and weariness, my mind and my heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally brutified.'”

Perhaps he was sick of brown rice as well?

Irish Exits

Summer's Irish Exit.

It hasn't happened yet, but it will. One morning we'll wake up, go outside and notice how damn chilly it became overnight. It's so chilly that you can smell it. After a while, the sun warms everything back to 68. That sting is gone and all is well and you can forget that it ever happened. That's summer practicing it's Irish exit on us, making us forget it was even in the room and using our inattention to slip away.

Then one day, actually a night, autumn moves in on the heels of a sharp Canadian cold front with it's winds briskly blowing all night long, and then that morning you'll find the wind still hasn't abated. The sun and summer slipped away at sundown and you didn't notice it. You do now though when you find it never warms up by the afternoon anymore. That damned summer was always a fair weather friend, it takes off when things become slightly uglier, or when it's sick of you.

Sick of you? Sure! All winter long we've lamented “Where's our fun friend, summer?” He finally arrives with short and tempting visits. Then by June he finally moves in. Of course, like all personalities that are too rambunctious, summer becomes an obnoxious drunk who won't leave you alone. “HA! How do you like my nine days of 90+ degree heat? I brought my skanky, moist girlfriend Humidity along too! I'm so annoying I'll keep you up half the night, you won't be able to sleep at all! My sister? Her presence will make you feel you haven't showered in three days!” Summer has turned into blustering white trash and feels slighted when you don't give it the respect it thinks it deserves. So summer pulls it's rude exit.

OK, I'll stop. Enough of my anthropomorphizing of summer. The truth is I won't put enough effort into this to make it a well written fairy tale. It's too damn early in the day.

Irish exits are great. You can bounce from any social event that you had your full of. From what I hear, the original Irish exit meant that you were too drunk to even say good bye to your friends and you just stumbled out the door. When I get my full of people (and I do...my problem, not yours) I'll make a break for it. It's funny. I'll be in the mood to chat the shit out of people but then the beer reaches a point in my brain when a switch is thrown. “Ack! Enough! All of you will you just SHUT UP!” Too much stimulation is what it is, for me anyway. So you just act like you're going to the bathroom and hey presto, you chose the wrong door and you make a bee line to your car.

I've always been like that. Feast or famine. Either I want the quiet of a Trappist monastery where I can feel my heart rate drop below 70 or I want to party with people who are playing “tag” with roman candles. (I've done that, as an adult, with other adults...where we foolishly decide to be 11 again). Feast or famine. I gorge then I purge. Gorge, purge. You'd think I'd find a happy medium? Nope, I'm a social bulimic. That explains a lot about my romantic life too.

We meet, her and I, both starving and we see a smorgasbord before each of us. We feast upon one another till we puke later in the month.

Me: “You had enough? I have.”

Her: “Ugh..I can't take another bite.”

Me: “Ok if we don't eat(see) one another again? I'm kind of sick of you.”

Her: “I was thinking the same thing...please go away!”

A nice, equitable parting. Not quite the Irish exit but a mutually agreed upon treaty where both parties won't feel slighted at all.

Irish exits are great for pure introverts. They can flee the raucousness as they find it to, too much. The truth is we all have varying levels of extroversion/introversion. The best description of it is that extroverts get insanely bored when there's not enough stimulation around. If alone, they suffer. Introverts can survive happily without people for days. Introverts suffer when they are overloaded with too much social excitement. In me, it's not a blend of the two, mixing around. Weirdly enough, it's a an either/or situation. Either I'm up for “it” or I'm not.

The opposite of the Irish exit is the “Unwelcome Illegal Mexican Entry.” That I can excel at. I can barge into conversations with people I never met before, yank the subject they were talking about waaaay over there and then demand all attention be placed upon me. Before long, they forget that this illegal wetback has stolen their conversation and we are chatting happily with one another. That until I get sick of that too and move onto something more interesting and barge into that one too.

Currently it's 6 am on a Sunday morning which means it's Monastic Solitude time. Sunday mornings are made for it. I can discharge all the wrong voltage out of my batteries and refresh them properly. By noon, I'll be getting hungry for others and will step out into the world again.

Don't Ask Me About Quilting...I Know Nothing of It...and Zillion Other Things Too

“The older I get, the less I know.”

Yeah, I believe it. There are whole swaths of life and experience I have no clue about. When I was 14, reaching that pinnacle of freedom and ridiculous self-confidence, I was damn sure about the world around me. I could figure it out. I was quick witted, insolent and right. That was before life got me in it's teeth and shook me like a rag dog a few times, that'll take the air out of you. What did it? Terminal illnesses. I came to find out my paltry powers were nothing against the World.

Now at my age I fully understand to shut my damn mouth because I don't know it all.

Every now and then I get a booster shot to shore up that belief.

Tonight, I came across an old co-worker who is still in the social service field. He had moved on from group home work to rehab homes where they try to dry out drug addicts. He then regales me with war stories of some of the patients he's come across. Yeah, it's a complete violation of HIPPA laws but guess what, it's violated all the time. The most harrowing stories are about crack whores in and about Providence.

Daniela was a NYC born Puerto Rican girl who fell into the hell of the Latin Kings at the age of 15. She had been kicked out of her home at 14 when she and her step-dad could not get along, and Mom wasn't about to lose her new beau, so out goes the daughter. She hung with friends when one suggested she could get easy money by selling heroin for the local gang. She did it and made enough cash to survive. That slow spiral into a shit storm was when she was introduced to crack.

She became addicted and with that, you tend to do anything to get that next hit so she ventured (but it sounded like forced) into being a teen slut for the gang members. “$20 Latin King Party Girl” she called herself then my friend says.

Gang life being was it was, it seemed far safer for her “go on her own” doing tricks and she was right. At least the beatings pretty much stopped unless she came across a John who didn't pay, except with his fists.

“She made her best money before 22” he tells me. “Girls that age are still cute looking and not worn out so they can command higher prices...Yay for the free market!” But as you get older and dragged assed from drug use, your commodity suffers and so does the price. So life gets dicier and perhaps it's time for a fresh start in newer fields.

She comes to Providence, works as a CNA a bit and to supplement the cash, she does the prostitution. Lucky for her, she had never been convicted of any crime that would prevent her from doing that work so at least there was that. But the drugs were nagging at her still. Looking like your 35 when you're 28 ain't the life to lead. She checks into a drug rehab unit and with some determination, and a lot of luck, manages to shake herself of the drugs. She's been clean for several years I was told but still looks years older than her current age.

**

I hear this story, which had a bit more detail than I'm letting on here and I felt a bit shocked. I know nothing of that life. I've known no one who has personally lived it. I was reminded again of lives I have NO clue about and it would be a cheap attempt to try understand it. I don't.

I”ve never lived in China, but I have read about it. Want me to tell you all about it? I know jack-shit about China compared to someone who's lived there. It's simple as that.

There was once a noir TV series called the “Naked City” that aired a zillion years ago. It ended each episode with the line, “There are 8 million stories in the Naked City, this has been one of them.”

I know my own story intimately well, perhaps a hundred more marginally well and the other 7,999,899 I know precious little of.

At 14 I could bray about what I knew of everyone, not so much now. You tend to grow up.

So I keep quiet. I know now how to.  

Only Kids Understand Horror

Most horror flicks don't do a damn thing for me. You have to have a suspension of belief in order to be frightened by them. I can't suspend it long enough because that rational part of me is always shooting holes in the plot. However, you should of seen me prior to ten years old and what horror flicks did to me then. When your a kid, you believe everything!

To this day I can recall one I saw on TV, when I was five, called “Five Million Years to Earth.” It had a decent story I was told but when you're five, great writing means shit. The jist of it was that construction workers unearth a five million year old spaceship that's has dead aliens on it. After accidentally powering it up, the alien history, life force or whatever begins to take control of the local populace. As it grows in power, it projects an image of itself over the city of London. When I first saw it, I ran into the kitchen to tell my father; “Dad! DAD! The DEVIL is on the TV!” It looked like the Devil to me. I had to alert my father to what was happening in the living room.

I really believed it.

This pic may seem corny but to a kindergarten kid, this was hell to take. I felt bad for the scientist who was the only one to understand what was going on and manage to swing a construction crane into the image to “ground” it to the Earth and stop the alien program. He and the crane went up in a shower of sparks. I probably had bad dreams for days after seeing this. And that's another great subject, nightmares you had as a kid that made you soak your PJ bottoms.

The next one I still remember was a TV show called “Trilogy of Terror.” It was a Richard Matheson piece where one of the stories had this lonely girl buy a Zuni warrior doll. On it was a gold chain that kept the spirit locked up inside. But of course, the chain falls off the doll and he comes to life. His only goal is to slice up the poor girl with a steak knife. The rest of the piece has her nearly escaping the doll's ambushes, tricks and traps. She then finally subdues the doll and gets it away...but has she? In the end, you see her smile, with a row of needle teeth while she's stabbing the floor boards with a knife. The doll had won and taken over her soul.

This thing doesn't deserve to be on anyone's coffee table. You're nuts to bring this into your house.

One TV show that I loved/hated was “Circle of Fear.” I'd watch it on late Friday nights only to have bad dreams. The worst one I saw was called, “Dark Vengeance.” A couple discover a box that's been buried and tightly bound. Of course, you're not supposed to open it and they do. In it is a carousel looking doll horse. On one side of the box, there's a mirror, which the new owners accidentally crack. Well, that did it.

The toy horse then proceeds to terrorize the couple as they desperately try to find a way to stop it. After investigating the toy horse through an antiques dealer, they come to find this toy is cursed beyond belief and it'll kill any owner who happens to come upon it. They also find out the last owner had put it in a box with a mirror to trick the horse into thinking it's mate was with him. That was the problem! The toy horse had a complementary female toy horse. She was lost or somehow broken and the boy horse went apeshit over losing his girlfriend. The new owners catch the horse, put him back into the box with a new mirror. Hey presto, the horse calms down and the they bury it under concrete this time around.

As a kid, you have to develop plans, actions and other things to ward off evil, ghosts, monsters and the such. If you don't, you're not going to wake up the next morning after you go to bed, because they will come out and KILL you.

I forget how young I was but my Mom told me she had purchased a toy horse for me that was advertised on the back of some sugary cereal box. “Four box tops and $2.99” sent to Battle Creek, Michigan and I got my toy horse. Apparently I loved it so I was told I carried it around everywhere in this neighborhood. I was four, so give me a break! I kinda wish I had it now but at ripe age of 10, I swore off all “baby” toys in this house and threw him out, along with a ton of other things I could make a killing on Ebay with.

But, after seeing “Dark Vengeance” I knew that horse upstairs in my bedroom was PURE evil. I had to get it out of my room...hell...out of the damn house! I managed to sneak it and me outside into the dark night and shoved it into our shed that did have a lock on it. I put the horse in there, yanked the door shut with a solid click. Only then, could I go to bed. For added measure, I kept my ceiling light on because spirits, monsters and lunatic horses are afraid of the light at night.

This is the Evil Horse of Dark Vengeance...

This is MY horse Sugarfoot...well, it's obvious to any 7 year old, the two are the same!

“WHO THE F*CK LOCKED THE DAMN SHED!” I heard my Dad yell the next morning. He was ripping the house apart for the keys to it. We never locked that shed and the keys were somewhere in the house, lost due to non-use. I just kept my mouth tightly shut. I counted myself lucky that I managed to imprison that damn horse for the night. 

Do you remember how pissed frightened you could get as a kid? It's that long ago...really. Here's a cute story for which I'll never forgive my older brother for, but that's what older brothers do, torment their kid brother's because “it's fun.”

I used to love playing in the cellar. It was full of cool things like hammers, tools, toys, old furniture from my grandmom's and tons of other things. We had a semi-finished basement that was all concrete all around but it was dank and damp at times and bugs would love to move in. Spiders mostly and the occasional centipede. Evil things that need to be stomped on.

If it was daylight outside,then it was safe to play in the cellar because I could see where the bugs might be. Also, demons, monsters and the like are afraid of the sun. I could do whatever I wanted down there with impunity.

However, at night, you had to have the light on, or Dad down there. No creature would dare to bite me if Dad was there.

After dinner one night, I flicked on the basement light and went downstairs to fool around. I must've been there for about four minutes when the light when dark. I couldn't see a damn thing. I did remember enough to know where the staircase was and I ran up it to find the door locked. I started banging on it like a trapped sailor inside a damaged, sinking submarine, screaming and yelling my head off to open it. I can remember looking around over my shoulder at that blackness and knew...just knew all those evil things were coming out to get me.

I hear my Mom then yell, “DAMMIT Kenny! Let him OUT!”

The door busts wide open and I come crashing through, panting and heaving with the look of terror upon my face. What do I see? I see my brother, half bent over laughing his ass off. He really couldn't control it, this was the funniest thing he ever saw. He had tears on his face from laughing. I then started screaming at him because I truly believed that being in that cellar in total blackness, would've gotten me killed. He was 10 and knew that there were no evil things in the cellar, but he knew, at five, that I believed it.

I'm 51 now and you know what kind of nightmares I get now? Boring adult ones. I once had a dream where my car broke down on some lonely road in Foster and no matter how far I walked, which person I talked to, there were no phones nor mechanics. I started fretting about how I would get home and how to fix the car. Yaaaawnnn. Well, it IS an adult nightmare if it came true.  

Now this scares me...even though it's pedestrian as hell, nothing like the wild fantasies I had as a kid.