What's Going On?

Seriously, what the hell? Who the hell wrote those three posts below supposedly made by "Dalmas" - the character I invented for Gumshod? Was it Isaac? He knew my name, could he know my password?

That must be it. This is some sort of crazy prank or something. He hacked my account - he probably hacked my laptop, which is how he knew my name. "Why?" would be the operative question, though. I don't have much money (I barely pay my rent with what I make) and this ridiculous charade is unnecessary even if he did want to drain my bank account. So is he just crazy?

Whatever. I'm changing my password and seeing if there are any key-loggers installed in my laptop. That must have been how he knew my password.

(strange loop)

I am fiction. I am words on the screen. I am not real.
I am real. Every idea is real or all things are false.
There is one thing I know: I know nothing.


 -- Dalmas

(being and nothingness)

You think you know what they are because you made them. You think you know their names, their functions, their faces. You don't know them. All information you have about them is wrong. Fear? Is fear what they are or what they cause? Are they embodiments or elements or abominations?

Perhaps they are all of these and none of them.

-- Dalmas

(perhaps)

You think you and your friends made them up? Perhaps they made you up. Perhaps they willed all of you into existence in order to bring themselves into this world, living on the thin line between reality and fiction. 


Just because something's made up doesn't mean it's not real. 


-- Dalmas

A mysterious meeting

I was doing my laundry today - I tend to do it pretty late, since it's cooler at night. So I was waiting at one of those tables outsides Starbucks (which was closed) while my clothing went through the dryer in the 24-hour laundromat across the parking lot. I was reading The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer.

And then a guy sits down across from me. All the other tables are empty, but he sits down at my table. I looked up from my book. He was pretty old - at least in his sixties, gray hair, wearing a heavy overcoat, and a large-brimmed hat. He looked at me and said, "There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. Which one are you?"

"Excuse me?" I said.

"I'm sorry." He spoke with a weird European accent. I think it was Italian. "I didn't mean to insult you. My name is Isaac. Yours is" and then he said my real name.

"How did you know that?" I asked.

"You don't know what you have made," he said. "You have created something which is far bigger than you. Now that you have created it, it has always been and always will be. Perhaps it was just waiting for something to create it before it could exist."

"What are you talking about?" I stood up.

"Even if you understood, it would not matter," Isaac said. "It isn't enough to have understood, if others refuse and continue to interrogate. You cannot stop it. You can only hope you do not get swept up in it." Isaac stood up then and narrowed his eyes at me. "I was like you once. I created something I could not control. I made it with my friends, like you. We made it up and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part." He smiled and turned to walk away.

I called out after him. "Who are you?"

He didn't look back, just muttered some random sounds - it sounded like "Ma gav tee la na ta." Then he turned the corner and left.

If this sounds like some sort of ARG thing, I know. I wouldn't believe it happened if I read it, but it did happen. I mean, I've had people say weird things to me, random things, but never like this. Fuck.

A poem

One of my favorites by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's called "Some Things Are Dark."

Some things are dark --- or think they are.
But, in comparison to me,
All things are light enough to see
In any place, at any hour.
For I am Nightmare: where I fly,
Terror and rain stand in the sky
So thick, you could not tell them from
That blackness out of which you come. 

So much for ''where I fly'': but when
I strike, and clutch in claw the brain---
Erebus, to such brain, will seem
The thin blue dusk of pleasant dream.

Other contributors

I keep forgetting to mention other contributors to the Fear Mythos. We have our main writers: LizardBite (also our artist), AllanAssuidity, CuteWithoutThe, Djay32, The Visitor, and 7224 (who has managed to make a pretty cool blog about the Black Dog). There's also Noaqiyeum (aka Blancmange), who hasn't written a blog, but has come up with some pretty cool ideas. My absolute favorite is their description of the Plague Doctor:

Perhaps the cloak hangs to the ground, concealing however it moves; it leaves no footsteps, only a broad, shallow ditch scraped clean of anything remotely biological. Those who interact with him are likely to become, not diseased, but hypochondriac, and to hallucinate sensations of things moving on or under their skin. Only if it doubles back on its trail, and you find it a second time, does true disaster follow.

On Cosmic Horror

I like reading Cosmic Horror (although I personally can't read much Lovecraft - his stuff is just way too dense with purple prose). It's all about eldritch horrors that we can barely fathom, creatures that if we actually knew enough about them, we would go barking mad. It's about a universe without hope - about creatures so powerful, we cannot defeat them, just hope to distract them, hold them back for a few years or decades. But eventually, they will arrive or awaken and we will all be royally screwed.

It reminds me of this movie I learned about from Stephen King. He wrote about it in Danse Macabre. It was called X- The Man With The X-Ray Eyes. On the surface, a schlocky cheap sci-fi film about a genius who invents eyedrops that allow him to have x-ray vision. He uses them to cheat at cards and see through girls' clothing (which is probably what we would do, if we had that power, right?).

But then he starts to see something else. His vision goes behind clothes, skin, muscle, bone, beyond everything, until he starts to see through the world itself, see into the center of the universe. And there, he sees something, some amorphous blob of pulsating colors. And throughout the movie, these colors grow larger and larger, brighter and brighter, while this genius hides his eyes behind a blindfold.

And then in the movie's climactic scene, when the bright light is almost overwhelming (and we know this is because something is coming here), he whips off his blindfold and we see his eyes are pitch black. He can't take it anymore, so he rips out his eyeballs and the movie ends on his empty sockets.

Stephen King writes of a rumor about the original ending, though, which is much scarier. He says there was supposed to be a line cut out. Just one line. The main character, after ripping his eyeballs out, was supposed to yell, "I CAN STILL SEE!"

And that is Cosmic Horror.

New nightmare

Had a new nightmare today. Need to write it down before I forget.

I was in my bed, but it was surrounded by trees. I wasn't in the forest, the trees were in my room, growing out of the floors, reaching up to the ceiling. It was dark. I could barely see anything, but I knew. There were things, creatures, hiding behind the trees. I could see their fingers, fingers made of wood and bark, like branches. I knew I couldn't move, because if I moved, they would know I was awake. So I lay there, not moving, trying to breath silently, trying to get back to sleep.

That's all I remember from that nightmare. I usually only remember fragments, small details. But this is good - perhaps I can use it for a future blog. Once I get rid of this stupid writer's block.

Noise pollution

There's always some sort of construction going on outside my building. I can't sleep. Even now that I want to sleep, I can't. I just want to open my window and shout "SHUT UP" to the world.

I figured it out

I figured out what that weird phrase I wrote in my notebook meant. I remembered it from Alan Moore's From Hell.

In the prologue of From Hell, two old men, former detective Frederick Abberline and psychic Robert Lees, are walking on the beach. Lees reveals to Abberline that he's a phony - he faked all of his "psychic predictions" complete with fake seizures. Abberline says that all the predictions came true, though, and this is what Lees replies:

That must have been it. I mean, From Hell is one of my favorite graphic novels ever.

Up late

It's like an experiment: how late can you stay up? Pushing your mind to not fall asleep, to stay awake. Slapping yourself. Caffeine caffeine caffeine. Don't sleep.

Write. Write stories, write poems, write anything. Don't just sit there, write. Do the write thing. WRITE GODDAMMIT.

Why can't I make my brain work? Why can't I put any of my ideas on paper? I have this stupid fucking notebook with random notes in it and I can't understand a word of it. What does "I MADIT ALUP AN ITALL CAIM TRU NEWAY" mean?

Old dreams

Dreams are an important part of the Slender Man Mythos and thus the Fear Mythos. Probably because dreams reveal secrets that we never knew about or the fact that most dreams are really freaky.

However, I always like to avoid Psychic Dreams for Everyone. I mean, having one or two prophetic dreams is fine, but most dreams have little to no meaning at all. They are just random assortments of images from our lives that our subconscious minds presents to us when we go to REM sleep. I think the best dreams in fiction are the ones that are suitably surreal and still leaves things unexplained. (Like the Buffy episode "Restless" - there was always one element to their dreams, the Cheese Man, that had no meaning whatsoever.)

Anyway, I don't really remember my dreams, but I do remember my nightmares. I had an old recurring nightmare from a while ago that I still remember: I would always be walking on the blacktop of my old elementary school, except instead of a field of grass, it was tall rows of wheat. And I would see my mother out there in the wheat field and she would try walking towards me, but there was a hole in the ground next to her and a hand (white and gnarled) would emerge and grab her foot...

That's the nightmare that's stuck with me, though there are some others I can remember. Just certain visuals, like the image of a classmate with a snake slithering through a hole in their head. Or one nightmare where I was chasing a skeleton, but I was the skeleton, as well (see, dream logic - makes no sense). Or the one where my family lived in an apartment building and to get to our apartment, I had to push a whale out of the hallway (okay, this one is less scary).

This is probably why I always try to keep any dream sequences I write weird and symbolic, rather than going "Ooooh, this is a dream, oooooh!" (That was my textual equivalent of the Wayne's World waving arms thing.)

Back to the grindstone

Returning to work after two days sick was a weird experience (though less weird than getting high on Dayquil and doing a cut-up of a previous post, but still). Apparently, we're having technical difficulties as well, because the power went out in the entire office twice today. One time, I picked up the phone and all I heard was this horrible screeching noise.

Actually, when I tried calling my sister after work, there was this horrible garbled sound and then it started ringing. Some satellite must be on the fritz.

The Fear Fascination

Why are we so fascinated by horror? I just got finished watching The Crazies (great movie, by the way) and a sudden urge to write about horror movies came upon me.

So: why are we (as a society) fascinated by horror? I mean, we make movies about haunted houses, haunted hospitals, haunted schools, haunted cars, haunted people. We make movies about demons, about ghosts, about vampires (not the sparkly kind), about werewolves (not the shirtless kind). And then we invent our own monsters, our Freddy Kruegers and Jason Vorheeses, which we make iconic. We make ourselves frightened and for what?

One possibility: fear makes us feel alive. Without that rush of adrenaline when the killer comes on the screen, we become bored. But then, action and adventure movies make cause excitement, too, so why horror? Why choose fear?

We're afraid of lots of things in real life. We're afraid of not making enough money, of losing our jobs or homes, of losing touch with our family and friends. We're afraid of things we have no control over, like whether the economy will crash or getting into a car accident or becoming deathly ill. We're afraid of cancer and bugs and the dark and serial killers and germs.

Horror movies (and books and comics) take this fear and give it a face, a form. They say, "Here is what you fear: Jason's mask. Freddy's claws. Look at them." They force us to confront our fears in a form we can become familiar with. Even friendly with. Look, our fears aren't so bad - I mean, that one girl at the end always gets away. Sure, all her friends and family have been slaughtered, but she's still alive. Until the sequel, that is.

Horror, ironically, gives us hope. Hope that we can defeat our fears. That by facing our fears, we can force them away from us. We fear lots of things, but we don't give up. We don't give in to our fears. Our fear of sickness (vampires), our fear of being overwhelmed (zombies), our fear of being ugly or deformed (werewolves), our fear of death (ghosts), all our fears. We are never free of fear, but we can focus that fear and keep it from flooring us. We will fail to flee from our fears, we will face them firsthand.

Sorry, got a bit alliterative there. Well, what do you expect from my name?

About the weird post below

I apparently wrote it while under the influence of a lot of Dayquil. Yes, it doesn't make sense. Actually, it looks like I just took the series bible post and rearranged all the words.

And that's not all I wrote, either. I keep a notebook beside my bed in case I get an idea before I go to sleep or when I wake up -- and when I got better from my Dayquil-induced fugue state, I found I had scribbled a few pages of generally unreadable stuff in it. You know, it actually looks like asemic writing.

Which would be pretty cool if I didn't also feel like crap.

Rebel Ibises

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Still sick

Since I'm staying home from work anyway, I may as well try to write something. Maybe a creepypasta or a poem? Don't know.

Need to get some fluids though. I feel drained.

New Group Shot

Courtesy of Lizard Bite (aka Seann) again.