Darkness

Soon in this forum I will tell the story about visiting the catacombs under Paris with Terri and Rob and visiting the crypts of St Michan’s Church in Ireland with Terri and Rob. These stories will illustrate my love of all things dead. Today I’ll give a little illumination to start things out.

I am a pretty happy-go-lucky person. While I use bitterness and cynicism like a shield against the arrows and darts of everyday life, I am not a dour or sullen individual. I love stories; however, and the best stories seem to be those which involve great love and great loss. The ultimate loss is death and the ultimate love is love which transcends death.

That’s too trite an explanation.

The stories I love to hear, and all stories are meant to be heard if only narrated by that voice in my head as I read them, are those which take me to places I would not have chosen to go without the storyteller leading me that way.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce, The Green Mile by Stephen King, Carrie by Stephen King, most stories by Stephen King, most stories by Rod Serling, Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, the movie Frailty, and the movie Apocalypse Now all take me to dark places which make me think.

The world has enough mundane horrors: child abuse, sexual assault, SIDS, AIDS, war, domestic violence, random mechanical failures and deadly lapses in judgment. I can tell you work stories which will make your skin crawl – just everyday occurrences: the woman who lies down for a nap with her infant and rolls over and smothers the child, the young adult whose leg was trapped in the blades of a hydroseed mixer, the family on their way back from a nice Sunday drive who get hit head-on by a drunk driver.

If I want horror, I need only go to work. At work I cannot dwell upon these things. In fiction I can go to these dark places and think about all these things and know that no one was actually hurt.

The skeletons and the morbid sense of humor is my way of whistling past the graveyard. My wife keeps me pretty much in line; I am forbidden to use my wood-working tools to build a coffin of any size in the garage.

She is the lighter side of me; she is the happy romantic; she is the lover of sunflowers and ladybugs. I am the darker romantic; the lover of skulls and cemeteries. She is the red; I am the black.

But together we are usually giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls and are very light-hearted. I do not dwell on the darkness but I think that you have to see the darkness in order to appreciate the light.

And black is slimming.