July 16th, 2010 Is it weird that I like having nightmares?
Seriously, remember me? I was really morbid as a kid in ways people didn’t understand or even realize. I remember drawing demons and ghosts in kindergarten, screw Yoda and C3P0 or the Muppets! My favorite dreams involved my brother turning into a vampire and having to stake him, it was terrible! In the dream I was so sad and it was so scary, but damn what a rush when I woke up sweating through my ET t-shirt holding my breath until I looked down off my top bunk to see him safe in his mini-bed, breathing a sigh of cool release. Or the lovely time I befriended Freddy Kruger and he made a glove for me and gave me a hat and we invaded peoples dreams together. Oh such memories.
By the time I was 11 or 12 I was really interested in psychological horror. I loved films like the Exorcist and Silence of the Lambs. I walked to the library and walked home with books loaded with such nuggets as True Crime serial killer studies, I had them all Dhamer, Gacey, Bundy, The Hillside Strangler, Jack the Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe etc. Also along with the bundle the Satanic bible, the anarchists cook book, and books on witchcraft and demonology. No one was gonna tell me what I can put into my head. That’s the one freedom I always kept for myself.
The frickin’ horror movies…
It had to have been it. The frickin’ horror movies. Dad and I went to Video Galaxy and rented a new horror movie every Tuesday. I was a sharp kid with a precocious intellect in many ways, so I assured him that I never had nightmares and that I really liked scary movies so we didn’t have to tell mom. In hindsight, I can see how they were the very essence of what I bonded to my father with. I am non-expressive, and so is he. I don’t think I kissed or hugged him since before I was a preteen. So things like horror movies which we both really enjoyed and spent a lot of time together doing, really meant a lot to me, but did it effect who I became? I struggle to think, it must have had a big effect. For one thing, I truly love the macabre, by the time I was in high school I was a “tortured goth poet” I took it about as seriously as I did the wardrobe, my favorite T-shirt at the time being jet black with a grungy white word splattered across the darkness saying “Poseur” . It was just fun, it was Halloween every day, you know why? I loved Halloween more then any other holiday including Christmas, screw the gifts, I want to dress up like Freddy!
I just like and enjoy dark and scary stuff, its so much cooler then rainbows and ponies and GI Joe and all that crap, I mean I liked all that stuff too, having more then enough attention to turn to many things as a boy, but nothing struck my fancy like Critters, Faces of Death, Evil Dead 2, or Texas Chainsaw massacre.
I always had a nickname for what I was “Darkling”, I was suprised they had many more “Darklings” on the planet, I didn’t really know until I was majoring in Creative writing in college, post goth and raver days, I think I was trying to be collegiate at the time. I wore a green turtle neck, what an asshole. I was in a class with a young professor and many other “darklings” the pride and delight we came to class with when we handed in our stories, it was a fiction writers course. Story after story of vampires, demons, death, serial killers. I had found a true home for my sinister delights.
So is it weird that I and many other people like waking up hot and sticky, throat dry and gummy from dehydration eyes teary, brain shrink wrapped in terror and mystery, from a wicked nightmare? Its like starring in your own horror movie, and you confront your fears and learn so much about your subconscious by what it chooses to show you.
What about others though? How many other darklings are out there?
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