TinYAP 035 — Cultural Warfare

Are we going to be punished?

We dared to draw a line in the sand, a line we have avoided drawing for three years because we did not understand such a line might ever be there or what it might turn out to be.

Now It seems as if Tina stands on one side of this line while we stand on the other.

Cultural Warfare is an ugly business often disguised by the presumption that anyone who does not wish to fit into society must be mentally ill.

Now we do not deny that we are mentally ill, any sane person would be mentally ill in this world, it is, after all, a mad, mad, mad, mad world…

<Yes, this is not another paradox, just another example of how things really are…>

No matter whose camp you choose to join, you must follow the rules, know the enemies, and kiss the holy asses.

Or else.

After all, even pacifists must have enemies; just ask anyone who is not a pacifist, they often hate pacifists and wage their wars without regard for pacifist objectives such as peace.

We would rather never drag the random world up to our ear.

Once upon a time we owned a telephone.  Our telephone brought us mostly grief.  Then we went broke and we consequently ‘lost’ our phone.

Now we are still broke, but Tina wants us to have a phone even though we have discovered that we do not want another phone because it has been a relief not to own a telephone.

Who would we call that we would not upset?

Who would call us that did not somehow upset us?

<shakes head>

Nope, we do not want a phone, not even Skype.

Tina has beaten us with invective, whipped us with anger, lashed us with frustration, and still we do not want a phone.

We do not think it should be regarded as our duty to own a phone.

Tina, who has complained and complained about how loud our tv is has the volume cranked up now to interrupt us, so we are being punished.

Doubtless she will find other ways to punish us, we can only fear where this may be headed.

We refuse to own a phone.

Will Tina waste money buying us phones we must then either lose or break?

Will she blame us for wasting her money if she dares to insist we must have a phone by purchasing a phone for us?

We do not want a phone.

Why can’t it be that simple?

We cannot stand the pain we hear in people’s voices; the more we talk with anyone we love the more pain and stress we must bear on their behalf.

We cannot stand the pain we feel in our heart, knowing that our private worlds are nearly entirely closed to anyone but ourselves; a phone may only fruitlessly remind us of how we have wished we could share our worlds with people we love who never seem to have the time, the patience, nor the inclination to come visit in our worlds, were we able to show them the way.

Nor do we want to hear from the many rude or random strangers who may arrive on the crescendos ma bell’s demanding ringtones.

We once thought we wanted to talk with our families, but we no longer ever hope that they will call.  If they cannot write a letter, then they certainly do not need to call.

If our inability to adequately reply to their letters sometimes perturbs them, then so be it.  We refuse to be caught in the middle between people with contentious information objectives.  We will take no sides but our own, even if this means we must hold ourselves hostage, speaking with no one but ourselves.

We cannot escape our pain, but neither do we have to share it on demand.

We feel better without a phone.

Shouldn’t that be enough?

So why is this a matter of cultural warfare?

Well, it is a local cultural paradigm that everyone should own a phone.  People automatically assume something is wrong with someone who does not own a phone.

But what if not owning a phone is really the right decision for us?

We may later change our minds, nothing is ever completely written in stone.

<whetting our chisel to continue>

We have not asked Tina to give up her phone.

We try not to make Tina a casualty of our war with her culture.

Cultural warfare is a game played over the generation gaps in family dinner tables.

Cultural warfare takes people hostage within their own families.

Cultural warfare is a dirty business because it is used to justify any number of crimes.

Here in the good ole USA, that’s really quite a few crimes.

America is the motherland of the very worst cultural warfare games, some evidence for this has been securely locked away in our prisons.  We have the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation in the world, and that is without even counting our mental hospitals, thank you.

Is this really, then, the Land of the Free?

Only if you choose to believe the cultural warfare hype and tripe.

If we believed we had a society we belonged among with whom we were able to participate then yes, we might want a phone, but only if we could trust that our phone would bring us more joy than sorrow, more happiness or relief than pain or stress.

We have no evidence of any society we might feel we might genuinely belong among; we have friends we love, yes, but we are not really any parts of their lives, nor does it ever seem likely that we may ever really become so.

Nor have we any evidence for trusting that owning a phone will ever bring us greater joy than sorrow.

The intensity with which we have felt our love for so many, many people has not been reduced by an iota by our missing phone.  Nor do we wish to study which is worse, the pain of never being called or the pain of wanting to escape an unwanted call.  Either way a phone is sure to bring us much pain and stress but little or no relief.

So for now, no phone; if circumstances change, maybe, but not now, nor anytime soon.

Give us time to continue to mend, we are still on our road to better health; a road which has so far been challenged by more pain than we know how to bear well.

Meanwhile, we may still regard this as a matter of cultural warfare.  If we say that phones are a huge waste of time we may offend a lot of people.

That, right there, is part of our evidence that phones are a part of an ongoing process of cultural warfare.  If we were mistaken about what a huge waste of time phones may be, then no one should be offended.  It is people’s reflexive, reactive cultural defense mechanisms which are really being offended.  Whenever we trigger one of those puppies it is typically a reliable indicator that we have identified another cultural holy cow.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al…

 

TinYAP 033 — Where Are We?

You might think it should be a simple matter to know where we are, but sometimes it is not so clear as we might like.

We have mentioned Shutter Island in earlier posts, so perhaps you are now familiar with the dilemma of the protagonist of that story.

We identify with that character strongly.  It is easy to believe we are in a very similar situation, it is easy to believe we have been locked away for ‘the good of society’ or ‘for our own protection’.

Of course this is absolutely true in a metaphorical sense; we keep ourselves isolated by habit, a matter that has caused us a lot of stress and grief in the past, and which may still do so now.

Shutter Island is a very scary story, as we may have already mentioned…

We sometimes tend to be solipsistic in our views; part of the terror of Shutter Island is that it reinforces our sense of our own madness and makes it seem more possible that we are alone in our own minds with no other company than ourselves.

How or why this may have happened we cannot say, so let us begin with what has happened?

We sometimes seem to believe we may be in some sort of vast hospital, mental, or other…

We do not always believe this, however when we do, that hospital might seem something very futuristic, or somehow in the future of the present moment, 201306222055 PST.

Here, we appear to be in our apartment, a modest 2 bedroom affair we share with Tina and Sid.

If Tina and Sid are real persons, then all is well.  However, in the hospital Sid and TIna are some sort of fictions we have created in some of our minds.

If we are truly psychotic, as we believe we are, then it is reasonable to believe we may really be in a mental hospital, and that neither Tina nor Sid may be real persons.

So how far back might our trail of hallucinated people lead us?

Also, if so many people in our life have really been hallucinated, then what might have happened that required us to build such an elaborate escape mechanism as we must then presume our current apperceptions to be?

One possibility might be that LSD is responsible.

We have certainly used quite a lot of LSD.

Of course, we have always thought LSD was more helpful than malign.

Given the degree to which we feel as if we really must be insane, perhaps we were mistaken about that?

One reason we might believe we are really locked away in a mental hospital is that it might explain the difficulty we have talking with anyone from our past, even though mobile phones have sewn the world together more tightly than ever.

So where did our madness begin?

Have we always been mad?

We have noticed that our memories are always suspect; we have seen how false memories may seem to arise in other people, so we have to believe that we can create our own false memories as well.  Of course, if we are mistaken about our perceptions of other people’s false memories, wouldn’t that have to be because our own memories are then somehow mistaken?

So it seems we may have left ourselves some sort of dubious, complicated way ‘out’.

Anyways…

One thing we must wonder if our hospital perceptions are true, is did we kill someone?

We can imagine a long trail of bodies, a very long trail indeed.

We have already admitted to killing our father, albeit we believe no one finds the story credible.

Might we have also killed our mother?  It seems likely, albeit we can still ring her up on the telephone; that is, if that really is our mother on the other end of the line.

Our madness scares our mom, but according to her, she was afraid we would do something dreadful to her since our childhood.  She suggests mischief, mayhem, and murder, but admits few details aside from one clear notion that we might lock her in the bathroom.

Of course, we might not yet be locked away, that part may still be in the future.

We may never yet have killed anyone, those bits may only be in our imaginations.

Might we kill someone in our future?

Have we really ever killed anyone?

We do not know.

We remember killing ourselves many times; many, many times if things really are as we might like to believe them to be.

If, as we maintain, we can kill ourselves over and over, then it stands to reason we may have killed many other people as well.

There is often this moment on the long slide to suicide where it seems reasonable that if we hurt so badly we wish to die then we may as well make our life count for something more by killing someone else first, someone who might best serve the world as a corpse, some villain or monster who creates too much misery, pain or terror just by living.

But how much is too much?

If we can apologize for George Bush, Saddam Hussein, or the devil, perhaps no one really deserves to die.

In the end, we may only have killed ourselves, but we doubt it.

Nonetheless, we are pretty sure there are no circumstances in which we might be fairly tried for murder, unless, of course, we really are locked away in a mental hospital, in which case, whatever might be considered real by our doctors may indeed include murder for all we can know at the moment.

But who would we have killed? and why?

We suppose we might have been anyone; but of course, the one person we might be most afraid of having killed would be Alina.

It is far easier for us to accept that we might have killed our parents, than it is to accept that we might ever have killed Alina.

<Pokes at psychosis> ah but YOU are not telling are you pet?

So if we did kill Alina, then we would have to guess that it happened that afternoon when we merged with her and we shared each other’s bodies.

Of course, if we really did kill Alina then, then there is a perfect ellipsis around the memory; we remember we were never closer to Alina than in that extraordinary moment, we were naked together, but entirely chaste, another day drawing each other, only this time we were tripping.

We had certainly tripped before, presumably Alina had tripped before as well.

The day ended on a strange note however, Alina had become scared when our bodies seemed to get swapped.  She briefly acknowledged what had happened but then did not want to speak about it.

Understandable.

We were excited by what had happened, swapping bodies was something out of science fiction or perhaps fantasy, we were disappointed that Alina did not want to discuss it, but we did not want to make her uncomfortable so we dropped it.

Of course, if all of our memories are suspect, then perhaps Alina never really died at all?

There are times when this seems possible as well.

But it hurt us so very badly to lose Alina that perhaps anything we can put between ourselves and our pain is somehow reasonable?

But where do we go from here?

Can anyone really know?  And if so, how can we trust them?

We simply do not know.

Nor is this yet another paradox, but only more of how things really are…

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseum, ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee…

TinYAP 031 — So! You want to be our psychotherapist?

Pink Floyd, (un)Comfortably Numb…

We yearn for the old days of therapy, days when our therapists were more like partners in a mutual quest for some functional, agreeable truths rather than surrogate annihilators whose jobs it has become to act on behalf of society to eliminate us as a source of social unrest, who make it their jobs to annihilate our thoughts and feelings because we make you sick with them.

Our diseases are highly contagious, they may infect anyone who cares enough to listen to what we have to say with an open mind.

We should not be quarantined simply because we make ourselves or other people sick, and yet, the social defense mechanisms that were parts of our own human operant conditioning require us to sequester ourselves; as a fail-safe, similar mechanisms learned by other people require them to close their hearts and minds to us and turn away.

This makes it difficult for us to find a therapist.  The only therapy we can afford is the meanest sort, the sort of therapy that has been put in place by society to ensure we never spread our diseases to anyone who might dare to help us spread them even further.

If we seek therapy from any of the sort of bottom-of-the-ladder clinical establishments we might still be unable to afford we put ourselves at risk of being defined as a clear and present danger to both ourselves and to other people; we might then be quarantined for the good of all concerned, lest we succeed in infecting many more people with ideas that may make us seem dangerously unwholesome to society at large.

And of course, there is nothing we would like better than to spread our diseases to everyone we come in contact with.

The most lethal weapons on this planet are harbored in the minds of everyone you know.

So what can we do about this?

If we must begin by presuming our own thoughts are so self-destructive that we will willingly participate in rituals that will inevitably destroy nearly all life on earth, then perhaps we must find a means of neutralizing this threat without also killing any of the patients or ourselves.

We would prefer not to continue living in quarantine; however, so far as we know, it is beyond our ability to lift our quarantine on our own.

All of our efforts to communicate with other people seem to come to an end when their cultural defense mechanisms kick in and remove us from their attention, by distracting their awareness away from us.  If we enter too deeply into their psychological space they may become physically ill, they may experience dizziness, nausea, headaches, or worse symptoms as a consequence of just talking with us.

Trying not to crap your pants when your bowels suddenly spasm without warning is a sure-fire way to distract yourselves in order to avoid listening to anything more we may try to say to you.

Of course, reciprocally, you have the power to make us ill with what you say as well.

Perhaps worst of all, we have the power to make ourselves ill enough that we must stay at home and can never come near nearly anyone else whom we also might make ill.

And, of course, our girlfriend and our room-mate are both sick of us.

Our girlfriend Tina is our prisoner, she is trapped here, she is condemned to live with us even though we make her sick and even though she makes us sick as well.

We wish it could be different; alas, given how things are, it seems inevitable Tina may someday choose to leave us, quite possibly by killing herself.

Perhaps she will be kind enough to kill us first.

So why should she kill herself?

And why should she kill us first?

Love.

We sincerely love Tina; we sincerely believe Tina sincerely loves us.

Alas, Tina appears to be powerless to stop herself from hurting us; as nearly as we can tell, we may be equally powerless to stop ourselves from hurting her.

That’s really fucked up, but it is also true.

This is not exactly another paradox, but well… you know… it is just how things really are.

Tina has forbidden us to kill ourselves or to die before she dies, so maybe Tina will be unable to kill us, and may only kill herself instead.

So why should Tina kill herself?

Well for all the best reasons, of course.

Too much pain, too much despair, too little hope, too little joy.

We are Tina’s joy, sometimes.  But too often we are her pain.  Tina has lots of pain, so perhaps we are not all of Tina’s pain, but we are Tina’s world, so our pains are her pains, and we are in a lot of pain.

And because Tina is our world, all of Tina’s pains are our pains, so we are in even more pain.

But were we in even more pain before we ever met Tina?

Before we met Tina we were in enough pain that we might have killed ourselves again.

We like dying, it hurts like hell, but it gets our soul clean for a little while, we can feel well for a few passing, pleasant eternities before once more returning to our stinking, belching flesh and carrying on our earthly duties once again.

Our deaths are good, but we must always return to the pains of our lives and pick up whenever, wherever , or whoever we were when we last left off.

Think of it as a sort of ‘no-littering’ ordinance; we are forbidden to leave our corpses strewn all across the various multiverses in which we have once more died again.

We must eventually, always reanimate every life we ever leave.  (This may be true for you too…)

So why is Tina trapped?  Can’t she move on without killing herself?

We do not want Tina to leave us; we believe Tina does not want to leave us.  Alas, neither of us may be able to love the other without either hurting themselves or hurting each other.

We cannot speak to Tina without causing her to harm herself; by causing Tina to self-harm, we consequently cause harm to ourselves as well.

Nor can Tina speak with us without causing us to harm ourselves, and by harming ourselves cause us to harm her as well.

So the obvious thing to do is to leave, except that leaving would hurt too much, leaving would hurt so much that we both would rather die, regardless of who chooses to leave who first.

So far, this has been the best we can do with Tina, a person whom we might wish we could love more than any other.

So how can we do better?

We were hoping a therapist might help.

We tend to neither like nor trust men, so we generally prefer a woman counselor.  We do not want a male counselor who might try to prop up his own immoral chauvinist behavior by trying to make us a co-conspirator in his own sickening, culturally-acquired pet paradigms.

However, a woman counselor may terrify us because we are overly familiar with the sorts of arguments we might consider using to get Tina to leave us if we were Tina’s counselor.  We find it hard to believe that a woman counselor would not feel compelled to somehow side with Tina against us because we might appear to be some sort of threat to Tina’s welfare; a threat we might possibly agree exists, but for which we believe we can take little or no responsibility because the threat was programmed into Tina’s initial human operant conditioning, long before we ever met Tina.

Anyways…

We do not want therapy to become an adversarial game, and yet, it may be the case that all therapists must perceive their clients as adversaries; possibly, all patients must also see their therapists as adversaries as well.

Nevertheless, we believe we want help.

We do not want help returning to the fold, we do not wish to be a sheople.

We want help changing the entire world; we are pretty sure nothing less will really help us.

Of course, we could be wrong, but first you will have to convince us we are wrong, and we will not listen to you if you will not also listen to us.

Alas, modern therapy has no more time for listening; and yet, we are also so-very-tired of being told we must shut up.

We are aware that we sound like a lot of other people whom we have seen sequestered for the comfort of society.  It is easy to label us psychotic, schizophrenic, or worse.

You may call us any kind of crazy we may appear to be to you; you may call us a basket-case.

You may call us hopelessly insane and walk away from us feeling justified that your compassion would only be wasted on us because, in your own smug opinions, we must either be genuinely crazy or even worse, we might be willfully mad.

We might admit we might be willfully mad, but if so, then we would say that we might be willfully mad with a purpose; we are determined to become well.  Alas, as we see matters, our madness provides the only doors through which we may begin to seek any cures.

Once you understand why we are mad you may become mad too; this may make us seem like a threat to you unless, perhaps, you know yourselves to be similarly mad already.

We are delighted to take that risk, the question is, do you have enough faith in yourselves to join us in our madness and possibly help us heal our pain as well as your own?

If not, then perhaps you could at least please help us to find someone braver than you, someone more compassionate, someone more willing to risk exceeding the limits of their own self-destructive self-interests.

We have a lot to say, all of which may be relevant not only to healing ourselves, but to healing all of yourselves and the entire collective human races as well.

In a toxic world, we make you sick by reminding you of how you are making yourselves sick. 

When you can no longer tolerate the sickness already inside yourselves you may blame us for bringing your sickness to your attention; you may and abandon us to our own pain, confusion, and despair rather than continue to the root of the problem in order to try to learn to heal it.

The entire world is lethally toxic.  You can only rely upon defense mechanisms based upon denial; ignoring any possibility of escaping your plights because you have learned to believe that you are powerless to change them.

We remind you that parts of yourselves still want to stop all the pain, and worse, that you really do still feel helpless to do so.

We remind you that in your despair you have wanted to kill yourselves.  We remind you that you still have no reasons to hope for anything better than your favorite mind-numbing games of bread and circuses.

We remind you of how much you still want to find something better within yourselves; and yet, you cannot seem to stop yourselves from continuing to make matters worse.

No amount of paint on your houses will fix the toxic wastes coming from our paint factories.

It’s time to make less paint, but you are so addicted to keeping up your fabulous, white-washed appearances that it appears as if you might really rather die first, even if, by carrying on in your self-destructive ways, you risk killing everyone else as well.

Shame on you, shame on all of us.

Stop whitewashing unbearable truths, stop hiding away from truths that may only be changed with the courage to finally face up to them.

What false, toxic, truths might be better bared?

Whatever you may already believe, for starters.

All mokitas must finally be spoken…

Are you game?

You are already infected, you were infected before you ever met us, your initial human operant conditioning was an inevitable, socially-transmitted infectious process; now you must learn to change your programming, your own most precious survival depends upon it.

So let’s begin…

Just the Same by Gentle Giant…
(we chose this version for the vocalist’s superficial resemblance to Alina, wait ’til you see the credits, spooky do…)

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad absurdum, ad infinitum…

TinYAP 030 — Doubt, Doubt, Our Fevered Minds Shout

We live in pain every day, physical, emotional, and psychic torments that we can never escape from except through the machinations of the puppets in our minds…

There are those terrible days when our entire world can melt away to reveal another world, a world in which we appear to have been locked away in some phantasmal mental hospital for the past 30 years or more, a world in which none of what we may believe we have perceived can be trusted to be real.

Too often, the more we consider such a possibility the more likely it seems to become.

If we really can allow no one to be real to us, then perhaps we can escape the inevitable pain that must result from our relationships with anyone and everyone we love.

How can we really know?

We are afraid to approach anyone we once knew who might know what really happened in our past; albeit even if they did seem to know, could we trust them to be informing us correctly?

When Alina died it seemed as if we died with her.

Of course, we might have been in a world of trouble long before we ever met Alina.

… sometimes we must wonder if Tina or Kelly has ever wondered whether Alina ever really existed?

On the one hand, it is only reasonable for any of our lovers to wonder about someone they could never know; on another hand our speculation might be some effort on our parts to uninvent Alina in order to distance ourselves from the pain of losing her, pain that might return with each new person we fall in love with.

On another hand we might be trying to distance ourselves from our fears that we may really have somehow killed Alina.  Perhaps she never killed herself, perhaps we killed her instead.

We can no longer be sure what is real, however as we listen to the story of ‘Shutter Island’ the portrayal of the protagonist’s extreme mental disorder feels very real to us and very personal to us as well, particularly in a metaphorical sense.  Shutter Island is a very scary story, particularly for anyone who might resemble a solipsist psychotic, such as we must sometimes consider ourselves to be, at least, in parts of ourselves.

For some 36 years now, Alina’s ghosts have stood like spectral shadows over all of our relationships, even with our newest girlfriend, Tina.

We have tried to consider this problem from Tina’s points of views.  Tina must choose what to believe and what not to believe with regard to what we may say about our past, there is no one Tina can go to who can reliably confirm or deny anything we may have said about our past.

Tina must answer disturbing questions such as ‘why do we have so few friends?’

Tina must ask why are our relationships with our past families so poor?

Tina must wonder why do our ex or our former step-children want nothing more to do with us?

There are no good answers to these questions that do not lead to finding us somehow suspect or unwholesome.  How can Tina ever be sure we were never a murderer or something worse?

It becomes possible for us to sometimes feel as if we have somehow murdered everyone we have ever loved.

Certainly we have murdered them in a metaphorical sense, in the sense that our relationships with the people we have most loved have all become so seriously estranged that we cannot relate to anyone we have ever loved without hurting both our loved ones and ourselves.

Our consistent isolation from our families, friends, peers, and various societies, have eroded our senses of who we may be, we have lacked any clear, reliable, externally sourced definitions of whom we may be that we may trust.

We have become a non-person, a tabula-rasa, a monster.

We naturally wish to believe we are a harmless, innocuous person; someone safe to introduce to your children, someone welcome to babysit them and tell them stories.

Of course, our apparent mental health issues may seem to rule out the possibility of such an innocent occasion ever arising with many people.  We cannot even be sure if we are someone we would trust with our own children, were we ever to have any.

We had told ourselves that we should never have children; then, in the nineties, we married into a ready-made family against all of our own best advice to ourselves, because we were lonely and had always wanted a family with kids.

We had a semi-idyllic life, half heaven, half hell; a life we could not sustain, a broken life we still could not heal.  So we hurt our wife and kids and eventually left them.

But before we left them, we learned to want to have our own kids, we learned that other parents are just as messed up as we were, if not worse.

So why shouldn’t we have kids?  Were we really protecting our kids from ourselves by never allowing them to be born?  Or would our children decide that the gifts of their lives were worth whatever prices we might later extract from them?

Are we grateful for our own lives and all the pain that has ensued?

Mostly we haven’t been very grateful; but then, one day everything changed for the better.

So how do we get back to those better days again?

Today we still hurt.

Today we wish we could hold Alina in our arms again to wash away all the hurtful things that have transpired from that terrible day she hanged herself until now, and still save all the best things in between, like Tina, Sid, our pets, and Megan.

So that is what we shall do, it may not have happened like that today, it may take us many eternities to get to that particular day, but there is nothing else we would rather do more.

It will happen that way, though we drag everyone we know through hell to get there.

It may be that we shall simply disappear one day; if so, we will not be found; just ask our ex, she complained that one day we stopped coming home, that the person walking through our door had become a stranger to her, someone she never loved and never would love.

We are sometimes sorry we are like that, but we do not yet know how to deliberately, agreeably, or decisively, change ourselves, nor do we trust that anyone else knows how we may somehow successfully change ourselves any better than ourselves.

We live in a scary state of affairs where whatever still passes for realities these days continues to erode away all around us.

C’este la vie…

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ado…

TinYAP 029 — Mind Control, Vigilantism, Bullying, Ostracism, Loneliness, Pain, Dehumanization

Torch-bearing villagers chase a monster through the dark night…

This is a scene from numerous horror movies; collectively, this scene becomes the most memorable, the most graphic, the most instructive message of the genre.

What does this scene teach us?

Perhaps the most important message is that there are times when it is socially acceptable to hunt monsters, and to hunt as a pack, as a mob of blood-thirsty avengers.

Nevermind whether fire-brandishing mobs misunderstand the monsters whom they hunt, monsters who may deserve more sympathy and compassion for who and what they are.

Mob justice was a more common phenomenon in ages past, particularly when there was little or no law to guide the hands of justice as a mob’s eager hands lynch some poor person trapped amidst the crimes of a community that lie in wait for some anonymous stranger to appear in their midst and be branded the villain of their crimes in order to satisfy the terrible fear, anger, and tension of an isolated village.

Supernatural causes for the disappearances of children and loved ones have also explained away the crimes of villains who hide as wolves among sheep and who manipulate events to shift the burden of their guilt toward whomever is hapless enough to make themselves a likely decoy to draw justice away from themselves.

The encroachment of law and order upon these communities, the shrinking of the distances between villages that have outgrown themselves, the appropriations of justice by church and state that tolerate little or no competition within their jurisdictions have all diminished the regular arisal of mob justice that might once have dominated many, most, or even all human communities.

However, mob justice accomplishes what the laws of god or man sometimes cannot; mob justice is sometimes still a useful tool by which to prosecute and punish some of the monsters that dare to prey on our communities.  Consequently, we must find ways to teach successive generations to accept and to participate in mob justice, albeit there may still be little or no real justice to it at all.

Remember…

The village was small, the sentries posted along the roads at night could keep no order within, each householder must keep order for themselves as best they could each night.

Around the burning embers of fires that have been banked for the night children and adults gather for stories told with chores.  Mending and whittling, weaving or fletching, there was always work for idle hands, and there were always willing hands ready to find mischief as well.

Unruly children eager to explore were a potential threat to any family or community, a threat often kept in check by adults eager to make some mid-night mischief of their own.

Fathers frightened their children if they ventured out alone in the dark, stalking them, preying upon their innocence and trust.

It was a father’s duty to keep their children home; a wayward child might be accused of any sort of mischief if they were seen away from home alone.  Nevermind if the accusations were ever true, if ammounting allegations against a child accused of criminal mischief could not be disproved they would harm the standing of the child’s family in their community.

Of course, much mischief could always be freely perpetrated in some adventurous child’s name.

Consequently, a child who would not obey, who would not stay in their home at night, was a liability.

A good father might simply lurk in the dark and pretend to be a fiend or ghoul or wolf or bear. Their wayward child would be duly frightened; or if not, something worse would happen, perhaps a scolding or a spanking.

A cruel father might not bother with any foolery, they might simply beat their wayward child black and blue to instill the necessary fear that would keep them safely at home minding their chores and lores.

And of course, children who escaped their parents rule at night might meet far worse fates than their fathers’ wrathful warnings.

Many unsuspected people might stalk the night with malign intents.

After all, everyone had some business in the night, business that might leave them without useful alibis or without their constant vigilance within their own homes.

Loose talk in taverns helped many criminals find their victims, victims that included a mark to frame for their crimes.

Any stranger passing through might do as a diversion for a mob misdirected by their own collective guilt over their own secret crimes, crimes that various mob member may hope to lay at the feet of a stranger silenced by a noose and then condemned with planted ‘evidence’.

Later…

We remember the voices of our bullies, some of whom were really shouting with their fathers’ voices, chiding or abusing us with the same words they learned at home, words used to hurt them, words which our bullies transformed into words with which they empowered themselves to hurt us in their places.

Imprinting…

If we had had more close family and friends we might have learned to imprint on other people more successfully.  If it takes a village to raise a child, then it is because a child must be imprinted upon a broad spectrum of people to gather a healthy range of values, skills, morals and good behavior.

As communities outgrow their village sizes the people of a community grow too numerous, trust breaks down, children must become more isolated by fear and change from a healthy range of human contact.

Anyways…

We grew up alienated from our family, we grew up with few friends. We learned to flee from the people we loved the most. We learned to be afraid of anyone we hoped to be friends with. We learned to abandon any hope of ever fitting in with family, friends, or any other communities of people.

Is it so strange we feel so alone and tormented today, even when we are held in the warm embrace of our girlfriend, Tina?

Is it so strange that we must contemplate how our relationship with Tina must end?

We do not want Tina to leave us, but it must seem to Tina, at times, as if we have already abandoned her.

We do not want to hurt Tina, but we hurt everyone we love; we do not see how it is possible not to hurt anyone we love. We must believe that Tina must choose to leave us because we cannot be the person she once loved.

This frightens us terribly, how can we change this awful prognosis?

We can scarcely speak to Tina without hurting her, and yet our silence is another punishment Tina must bear if we hold our tongue.  And it seems we must hold our tongue or else we will somehow lash her with our tongue without ever meaning to.

But oh! Far worse when we deliberately speak in ways we know must hurt her.

We are a person who has been broken out of the world of human societies.  Perhaps we broke ourselves free, perhaps we were outcast, perhaps we simply slipped through the cracks and gaping chasms of some insufficient interest in our welfare.

We were raised by monsters to become a better monster.

We eat bitter meals from violated altars, accepting a faceless form of charity stolen from communities that cannot otherwise succor us among themselves.

We might seem to have been tamed by our own timid needs, but we cannot be included; we remain wild, a creature without solace, with no kind amongst whom we may find a home where we may feel we truly belong.

We hate this life, and yet, we must also love it, because it is the only life we know.

We cannot join anyone in simple pleasures.

Going to a movie is a torment; visiting a park is a pain.

There is nowhere we may go where we do not feel the knives of our alienation more deeply thrusting through our anguished, broken hearts by seeing other people, people who seem safely embedded in their tidy lives, lives we cannot find ourselves included amongst, even when we are warmly made welcome.

Perhaps we should have taken someone hostage.

Oh wait, we have done that before, we have done that many times.

We see how other people hold themselves hostages, we have seen how other people hold others hostage as well.

Taking hostages is a time-honored tradition, even a duty, albeit a duty we have tried to shirk from.

Were we able to adequately imprint upon and bond with other people we might be able to participate in the hostage games being played out all around us without any qualms, our misgivings swept aside by our societies’ and cultures’ willfully blind dependence upon holding everyone hostage.

If we refuse to be a hostage then we become a hostage to our own refusal, we become a hostage by our ostracism, a hostage to the social isolation that results from our failures, and worse, from our refusals to play the game.

If this is not yet another paradox, then this is still just how things really are.

It is a good thing we cannot kill ourselves, for otherwise we surely would.  Alas, our commitment to life is more like a lunatic’s commitment to an asylum.  We may be locked away forever with only ourselves for solace.

We hurt.

Are we mad to choose to believe we may still find any relief from our pain?

We are terrified of making friends and yet we must always still hope to find them.

Must we always hurt others in response to our own pain?

Enjoy!?

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al, ad absurdum, ad nauseum…

PS
The antagonists and protagonists of today’s horror shows are becoming increasingly confused, such that it is easier to be more sympathetic toward the monsters and more judgmental of their victims.  This might be a good trend, except that the solutions to the problems portrayed in their stories remain violent and too often still rely on dehumanizing the characters their audiences are being directed to admonish.
Please remember, all the heroines and villains of our horror shows and legends are metaphors for human beings; when we are taught to believe in the inherently evil natures of any group of people, whether they are portrayed by zombies, vampires, lycans, animals, or aliens, all of our heroes, villains and monsters are also always ourselves.