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.
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.
I, I alone have seen the Phoenix fail, His regal wings their vibrant glories vail In gyres of baffled crimson, flagging gold Below the heaven of his conquests old. I, I alone have seen the Phoenix build His pyre with bitter myrrh and spices filled Amid the ardent waste; and none but I Has known his death and immortality, Has watched the yellowy teeth of flame consume Shell-tinted beak and heaven-painted plume, Has heard the fatal anguish of his cries And felt the fierce despair with which he dies Oblivious of that rebirth to he. Nor shall another know the mystery Of flames that turn to plumes, and ashes stirred To yield once more the fiery-crested bird With beating rainbow pinions that arise And take again the lost Sabean skies.
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.
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