Strange looking trees, caves and caverns, spider webs pressed to glass, cemetary rubbings, morticians humour, Christmas lights and glow in the dark things like jellyfish and fire flies, old medical illustrations, abandoned buildings and haunted forests to explore, unusual architexture and oddly shaped buildings, Deros and gremlins, ancient Native American legends about giants and/or dwarves, Bonsai trees, waterfalls, icebergs, entomology, moss covered things.....and candy, molassas and Black Forest ham.
Music
soundscapes, crescending waves of beautiful noise, the voices inside my head, crickets, cicadas, peacocks, kittens mewling, odd folksongs about crossroads.
Movies
Seance for a Rainy Afternoon, Suddenly Last Summer, Island of the Mushroom People, Decasia (decayed film stock set to haunting decayed music), the Devils, Vincent Price films and Peter Lorre.
Films you can watch different times and get different things out of rather than throw away mega blockbuster films that cost millions of dollars and are as fulfilling to watch as video games.
Television
the worse the better. Television should never be so good that people want to watch it all the time.
Books
odd local history, Curiosities and Abnormalities of Medicine and Science, Dear Dead Days, Wisconsin Death Trip, some Burroughs and JD Salinger, Lovecraft, Robert Bloch and horror and dark fantasy short stories.
I like humour and horror. They both overlap alot.
Heroes
ToeClaw, Sasquatch, the Wildman of the Woods, ambulance drivers and firemen.....and the garbageman because with out him everyone would immediately know right away.
The first time .... Ever I punched your face ~ I saw the blood .... Swelling your eyes ~ And I made ... You see stars ~ Then they closed ... And everything went dark ~ Like the night-time skies ...
And the first time ever ... I punched your mouth ~ I felt your teeth .... Move in my hand ~ Like the trembleing heart .... Of a captive bird ... That was there ~ At my command ... my love.
And the first time ... Ever i strangled you ~ I felt your heart ... So close to mine ~ And your eyes and mouth ... Would fill with earth ~ When I buried you... my love
The first time.... Ever i punched ~ Your face ..... Your face ~ Your face......
Phantom limb pain consistently baffles the medical community. Theories abound as to its cause, but they are only conjecture, and no consistently effective treatment exists -- until now. Clinical trials of "mirror therapy" at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have yielded surprising and welcome results. Mirror therapy consists of positioning a mirror in such a way that the intact limb is reflected in the position of the amputated limb. Patients flex and stretch the intact limb while looking in the mirror, creating an illusion for the mind that both limbs are present. After one month of mirror therapy, all patients in the clinical trial reported "significantly less" phantom pain. Half the patients performing the same routine with the mirror covered experienced an increase in pain, and those who only visualized the treatment experienced a 67% rate of decreased pain. When these patients were switched to mirror therapy, 90% experienced decreased pain. A similar study on mirror massage seems to corroborate the results of this study. The prevailing theory on phantom pain's origin is that the brain's ability to tell where a limb is located, which does not alter after amputation, is in conflict with the visual input of the missing limb. This conflict causes neurons to misfire, which sometimes results in a perception of pain. By bringing the visual input in alignment with the body's proprioception in mirror therapy, the brain is tricked into thinking both limbs remain present. Misfiring lessens, and pain decreases.
When you are finished with the new Ark Spurting Blood album you should send it to that kid in Wisconsin who tried to have safe-sex with the dead girl. I think that it might bring him some comfort, help himn see that he's not alone in this narrow-minded culturn of Authoritarianism masquarading as Conservatism. Can't a boy just fuck a corpse? It's not like that old Cow-poke Senator who was REALLY a COWPOKE senator, at least the corpse was dead already, you know?
When I was twelve, I used to go to the duck pond down the street from my house and catch and release the bullfrogs living there and in the canal beside it.
Anyway, one day I was down at the canal when I met three boys who were up to the same thing. They were brothers, the eldest being my age. They all looked like clones of each other, with an appearance very similar to Opie. I didn't know them, but they seemed friendly enough. My guess is that they were in transient quarters, billeted while their family was either going to, or coming from a Far East deployment.
They had a net and bucket, and I volunteered to show them where the big frogs were. Suddenly, they spotted molting pollywogs lying half out of the water, basking atop the algae in that ultra-vulnerable stage between gill and lung use. The boys grinned, scooped one up and roughly deposited it on the gravel at their feet. It lay there gasping pathetically, writhing, and before I could even figure out what the point of this was, to my horror they pulled out slingshots and proceeded peppering this helpless amphibian at point-blank range, whooping it up as it died. My wimpy protests had ceased in shock, and suddenly I shoved the eldest of the three boys (very unusual for me - I was a craven, skinny little coward) backwards into the filthy canal. He submerged in the scum-choked water, then came scrambling back up the bank. I was certain that now they would proceed to clobber me, but the other two merely rushed to him. He had blood gushing down the side of his head from a gash in his scalp. There was a metal culvert under the water, which his skull found. Terrified that I was about to get in trouble, I split. Last I saw, his two brothers were walking him back from the canal. He was obviously hurt, and they were more concerned about him than me.
Since I never got in trouble, I know he didn't die. That would have been very inconvenient. Hope he got an infection, the bastard.
Denis said he had heard there was a dead deer floating in the river; and since Scott was collecting antlers, that we should go down to the river to collect them.
We all lived on a commune in the woods of Virginia. Scott and I met in pagan group, and we were both from Southern California. I was newly pregnant with Scott's child.
It was dark as we started out on the short walk to the river the night of the dead deer; and we were laughing. The trees were skinny and bare, it was late fall. As we got closer, we could see the huge body bobbing, gently; in the cold muddy river.
It took all of their strength to pull the deer out, and Denis proceeded to disattach the head from the body with a hand saw.
He quickly tired, and gave the saw to Scott, who stripped down to his loin cloth, and started to saw.
As I listened to the sound of the saw echoing through the woods, a sickness came over me. It was the worst sound I had heard in my life at that moment; and I could tell that the physical strength it took to saw through that bone was almost more than they had. I asked them to please stop, stop making that sound, but they didn't want to waste the carcass, now that they had gotten started.
They took turns sawing. Grunting and sawing.
Until the head finally came off.
The mood had changed as we walked back from the river, the men carrying the unbelievable weighty head between them; and as I glanced behind me at the carcass left on the shore, I thought I saw a figure in the shadows, tall and gaunt, with what looked like a cow or deer-skull for a head, and a claw for a hand; and the sound of the saw echoed in my head, until the chimerical shape disappeared into the shadows of the thin, bare trees.
When I was a kid, they had a lot of astronauts like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, who were always going up into space and returning in space capsules that fell to earth and landed in the ocean.
We also had lots of tomatoes and tomato worms were everywhere. Bear with me, please, this story has unrelated details that all tie together in the end.
Remember those toy plastic barrels that you unscrewed one barrel and it had a littler barrel inside it, then an even littler barrel, until you got to the very smallest barrel and it had a plastic toy monkey glued in it? The toy was called "Monkey In A Barrel", I think.
Anyways, me and my younger brother found a tomato worm so we named it "John Glenn" and we put it in one of the plastic toy barrels and screwed it shut. Then we put it though the rigors of space travel by playing catch with the barrel and throwing it way up on the air in a spin, and letting it crash to earth, repeatedly. After about 15 minutes, my brother figured that it was time to open up the barrel and see how "John Glenn" was doing, inside it. He unscrewed the plastic barrel, and then he dropped it and gagged and flapped his hands around, then he leaned forward and threw up, because "John Glenn" had somehow become whipped up into a frothy green and yellow foamy custard that filled the barrel as if it had been in an electric blender, and "John Glenn" came foaming out and got all over my brother's fingers!!! I couldn't beleive how much bubbly disgusting foam a tomato worm could turn into. It was really creepy, like one of those cheap 1950s rocket-to-space sci-fi thrillers, where the rocket comes back and they open it up and the space pilot got turned into a huge disgusting blob of merengue, just from being in outer space--where mankind was never meant to venture into.
I didn't grow up, around these parts, I did not spend my infancy crawling around on the ground, in this hemisphere--so it is natural to assume there is a great deal of infamiliarity regarding those life forms that DO wriggle along on the ground, in this part of the country. I spend most of my time with my head 6 feet above groumd level--and not down there where the insects tend to live, for the most part. The nearest my head gets to the ground is when I lay down to sleep on my bed, asnd sdmittedly I have sleep disorfers and sometimes my eyes open wide in my sleepm and whatever shapes that lay before me in my visual feild just enter my mind as is, without passing through that part of my mind which processes incoming visual stimuli and tells my cognitive mind what exactly I am seeing.
I do, however, awaken at times with fading dream-memories of a horrble, disgusting, prehistoric looking insect, and then within two or three days, I discover that very same insect, in my apartment! Generally I find these solitary insect forms near or underneath my bed--and it unnerves me to think of my bed--a sacred place upon which my sleeping form reposes in helpless vulnerability with my mouth open--as being a place where hideous semi-crustacheous insectoids might violate, by crawing through as I sleep, often with my eyes open, but there it is.
One time I had a herd of maggots crawl on me when I was laying on the floor staring at the ceiling. Sometimes I like to do that. My girlfriend screamed, she saw them first, and I had to go take a shower and use mouthwash. None went near my mouth this time but it seemed like the right thing to do. Not sure where they came from but its probably because we occasionally take a while to "clean up". We had to write positive affirmation-like statements all over the house to remind us to be more tidy. I think it was more to make light of it. It helped for a bit but did nothing to make me forget. Sometimes I see them in my sleep.
My grandmother's basement has a door in it which leads to "THE SHED" a woodshop/workshop where my grandfather used to work, dug into the dirt under the house.
All of us grandchildren were scared of that door and what it led to when we were kids. While one is sleeping at night, one wakes periodically to peek at the door, in case anything is opening it from the dirt dugout on the other side.
One night, while I was visiting from Virginia, my 2-year-old and I were sleeping on the floor, on a big, comfy pallette I'd made from blankets and pads; when I awoke to the sound of mice scurrying or tearing at some tissue paper that was in some Christmas boxes on a shelf to the right above me. I went back to sleep and woke up later to the same sound, so I turned on the light, seeing on the wall above our bed a huge "POTATO BUG!" It stood still while I went to look for a shoe, but being a hippie all I had was a Birkenstock (made of cork) I was screaming, my daughter was crying, and I slapped it once, but the damn shoe just bounced right off of it. The potato bug stood unphased, now moving it's human newborn infant-looking head and pincers. I tried to hit it again, but did no damage. It was sturdy and frightening to look at close-up and I just couldn't hit it again. I took my girl and we got off the pallette on the floor up onto the uncomfortable bed I hadn't been able to sleep on earlier that night.
The next time we visited, my grandfather sprayed the basement with poison, but I had, by that time, learned that "Jerusalem Crickets" lived underground, so there was no way we could eliminate them from a basement connected to a dirt dugout. I have not been able to sleep in my grandmother's basement since.
Once I dragged a generator and an electric jackhammer into a cave that I intended to turn into my secret layer. The vibrations of the jackhammer somehow induced the black widow eggs on the ceiling into all hatching at that moment and thousands of micro albino widows jumped on me and bit the shit out of me. I was sick for a while.
In 1978 I had a terrifying experience in the outskirts of Miami, near Chrome Ave. Detention Center, when I stumbled upon a swarm of Palmetto bugs. Anyone in the know can tell you that Palmetto bugs are essentially giant roaches that fly. The are like 4-6 inches on average. One went up my nose and a few touched me on the lips. Several landed on me. It was really fucked and I cried.
