I Must Rely on My Fingers, For My Feet Have Already Failed Me.

Milky light, morning mist, dying leaves drifting to the earth on their last breath, cold morning and eternal afternoons from which time flees. Dead evenings filled with other people's words and other people's faces. These are the things my life is made of. There is freedom in it, but there is also sadness. I have far more dreams than money, and even when my eyes are open, I see places that aren't here. I dream often of New York. I've dreamed of it three times this week, of the sights and sounds and the hole-in-the-wall pizza joint that gave me my first taste of the city. Last night, it was the pizza joint. Before that, it was the flash of a yellow cab on the periphery of my vision, and before that, it was the drab dun coat of the cabbie who tried to hustle us out of Penn Station, his knit cap and coarse beard and contemptuous impatience with our bewildered faces and nerve-thick tongues. When I don't dream of New York, I dream of sex, torpid and strange and often frustrated, full of rage and a need that is never satisfied. I know why I dream of sex, so tantalizing and unattainable in my waking hours. I do not know why I dream of New York. Perhaps because it was a place and time so rife with possibility, so ripe with hope.

The hope is not dead. It is tenacious. It clings. But the anger has grown. The anger burns and cuts and strips and makes me raw, nerves and patience frayed and screaming. Roomie is my best friend, and I owe him everything, and sometimes I hate him for it, hate that the ledger will never be balanced. His voice is the only one I hear for days on end, for months unbroken, buzzing and burbling and droning and needing, needing, needing me to hear it. It vexes me, and I grow sullen and irritable and wish he would forget the art of speech. Sometimes, I wish he would go away, but not really, because if he were to fly away, then life as I know it would follow. I would be Alice lost in Wonderland, and I would not find the rabbit hole, but stumble headlong into it and tumble down into the dark, and at the end would be no Cheshire cat or Mad Hatter, but red queens in nurses' whites who would banish me to a dungeon from which I would never emerge. Linoleum floors and urine walls and Jello three times a week. Bedsores despite the weekly showers and a foreign, indifferent hand shoving a tampon into my aching, unused cunt, the closest I'll come to human warmth.

Rage, impotent and cloying, boils, exacerbated by the knowledge that there are those who peer into this glass-walled room simply to point and laugh and assure themselves of my pathetic, wretched uselessness, my loveless, bitter life. I hate them, but I despise myself for caring. I retreat from this caged existence as often as possible, flee into a world without borders, a refugee from my own life. I would stay there forever if I could, would will myself to the other side of the rainbow, but Roomie always pulls me back, intrudes with his constant, jolly yammering and upends the dream, returns me to a world of insipid television and terrible dinners.

So I sit here with tension coiled between my shoulders, the threat of a cramp, and I write my strange little worlds whole and I write my porn, and I wait for the sun to warm my skin again. For my nose to smell something besides the jungly fetor of Roomie's last shit as it wafts down the hall. I write and I write because it is better than perfect stillness, than dying while I go on breathing and blinking and shitting and wishing. I write and tell myself that I smell cornmeal and pizza dough and freshly-baked doughnuts. I write and tell myself that I see a Texas sunset. I write and tell myself that if I write long enough, then one day I will look up and find that it is time to fly again, that I will taste Kansas City barbecue or New Orleans gumbo or a shrimp cocktail with sauce so fresh it prickles on the tongue. That if I write long enough, six Peter Pans will open the cage door and fly me away to Neverland, and when we pass the first star on the right, it will be close enough to touch.

Guera's Halloween Treats

I found these through sf_drama's creepypasta Halloween post and thought I would share them. They're a pair of short films by a team of independent filmmakers.

Cleansed. Warnings for blood and references to domestic violence. A crime-scene cleaner enters the site of a horrific murder and finds more than blood on the walls.

Bedfellows. No warnings here, just a creep factor of ten. Have fun sleeping tonight.

These same filmmakers have an entire Youtube channel full of these films. Some of them are mediocre, but a few of them pack a wallop.

For Halloween films of the feature-length variety, I recommend these:

-the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This film has an undeserved reputation as a gorefest, but aside from a few scenes, there is very little blood or gore. This movie isn't a splatter flick; it's an unrepentant mindfuck, and there are parts so disturbing that to dwell on them for long invites a bout of the screaming memes.

-the original Halloween. The later sequels devolved into hokum, but the first two are unnerving. Houses and hospitals are supposed to be sanctuaries, but they're not.

-Session 9. Oh, dear God. A deeply-unsettling picture that raises the question of internal versus external evil. If Gordon wasn't insane when he went into the asylum, he was when he came out.

-The Blair Witch Project. Yes, the acting was often histrionic, but the symbols in the woods and the final scene were so haunting that I slept with the lights on for a week after my first viewing.

-the American version of The Ring. The TV. Oh, God, the TV.

For more child-friendly fun, you can't go wrong with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island or Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost.

For a scary read, I recommend ""Lunch at the Gotham Cafe". Eeeeeee. Eeeeeee.