longer.blue

Casualties Are Inevitable When we moved back to Texas from South Carolina my parents purchased a mobile home from a repossession lot - the Repo Depot. Built in 1980, it is the one I sold last year, heavily modified. The interior paneling - thin enough to be cardboard but pressed from coarser bits - was styled to appear like hardwood paneling popular in the previous decades. Every twelve feet or so had the same repeating fake woodgrain design printed on it. One of the knothole facsimiles looked exactly like the face of the demon that is revealed under the magnifying glass examining the steam-fogged bathroom in Amityville 3-D. I watched almost nothing but horror movies and read as many horror novels as I could, the genre being what I most identified with life's median condition. It was like having a comforting reminder that made sense of the environment always persistent. By the time I was raising my own child in that structure, her mother having abandoned us, I had either removed the substandard material in favor of denser wall or painted over the tobacco tarred surfaces. Like a majority of offspring, I am a steadfast opposition to what they got wrong. Kallisti did not grow up in fear of her parents, or anyone. There was no screaming and arguing, or constant displays of violence. Happiness and laughter, music and play. Messes are allowed - they can be cleaned. It is the memory of the events that count and build a lifetime. Constant change of decoration and floorplan to suit the needs of the present. An example that one creates the world one wishes to behold. My daughter is a better musician than I am, able to improvise melody in key and with accurate, immediate phrasing. When she was a crawling baby, I would lay my electric guitar on the floor with the buttons of the multi-effect floor processor next to it. They're made to stomp on and are quite durable. Joyous noises unto the Firmament keep the malcontent spirits far from bedroom bedsides. Since moving away from the parental units at fifteen until about five years ago the decrepit faces leering sinister from walls and such - store shelves, roadsides, trunks of trees - were merely cartoon animals in clouds wisping by on blue seas. But there are monsters. Many resemble bystanders in store aisles, uniform wearers; those who present themselves as friends and family. Terrors inhuman as well, that grip the dream states and litter them with jagged barbs that later will rend and tear apart thoughts during waking hours. They can be dangerous. Sure. But only if comply with their wicked whisperings. Forget, perhaps, that their illusions have no substance. Their intimidating strength is only in number. None of them are heroes or have the capability to act as one. We are at war. But we are the stars of the production. The cameras follow us and tell our stories - as we decide to write them. Some of us will fall. Casualties are inevitable. But when we do, we become ethereal bonfires - astral sources of power and replenishment for those of us left who need. That is something the nightmares roving both street and psyche do not have benefit of. Choose your weapons. Stay vigilant. Hell is what we fashion for them. Fear is a quiet event. Victory is thunderous, elemental. Assured and unmistakable. Yes, child. There are monsters. But they are not part of the design. Hunt them down and eradicate, erase them. Until their memories are entertainment. Thank you to everyone for reading. Your time is not taken for granted.