Notes from The October Country
Written on Friday, October 13th and posted the day before the anniversary of granny's passing.
Hello, middle October.
Many of us come alive during the time of dying. I have a sense of being unmasked during the season of horrors.
Skeletons lounging on front porches, horror all over streaming (I miss flipping through the channels and coming across Jeepers Creepers. It’s not the same to have all this choice and to choose), an 8-foot baby doll coming to life with a low-quality, distant-sounding scream as you walk past her in a Spirit Halloween that only last month was a Bed Bath & Beyond. Death, everywhere. We mourn soulless stores, too.
Of course, as with any holiday, story, or place, the month of October and the Halloween that permeates each day can be carried with us, celebrated all through the year. But in the past few years, I have come to find pleasure in following the seasons and the atmosphere they bring with them. The small buds at the tips of bare branches bestow the relief of renewal. I surprised myself when I craved the brutal summer sun to soak into my pale legs, though I don’t want to be burned. With self-restraint, I avoided the year-long Halloween so that I could suck the lifeblood from this October when it arrived.
What is it about this creeping season? I have theories, all of them true and false if we think in terms of stark duality, but I’d rather not.
One theory: we become more conscious of living a story this month. In the gloom of a cloudy day, what follows me from tree to tree? True crime performs the same function, but it often manifests an unhealthy paranoia. Life, the story of it distilled in the October Country.
As I dread the passing of time from the present, I try to slow the days of October. Life is vital right now because of the proximity of death, as are my memories of Octobers that came before.
The kid in the Michael Meyers mask following us through the streets of White Oak during my last year of trick-or-treating in 2006. Why did I grow up so fast?
Biking through Forsyth Park, the Spanish moss hanging all around me, but not reaching for me, as I moved through dark and orange in 2011, wishing for the visible presence of ghosts.
Snowdonia in 2016, all that green and history bringing me closer to seeing, feeling the layers of life and death.
Walking around Lake Peachtree with my mom, standing in front of the tableau of word-play graves and plastic creatures of the night that is on display every year next to the golf cart trail—hopefully this year and next year, too. This was the year I didn’t seek the kind of horror that leaves the world feeling cruel and damned. I was inside of darkness in 2017. That year seemed to leave a curse on October. Each October afterwards was met with arguments and alienation until last year, when my granny died on October 17th.
I’ve joked that she passed in October because she hated my love for horror and interest in the occult. October would never be the same. Her death made that certain.
Although there has been a sense of foreboding this month, the draws of The Tower, I am enjoying the world around me, and the experiences it offers. Ever since granny’s death the phrase “I am made new at the expense of you” has appeared in my mind over and over. What a cruel joke. The greatest gift is made more precious because it was given to me by granny and grandpa, who died two months before her on August 10th.
An aside: Granny didn’t die of a broken heart. My grandparents had been divorced since the ‘60s, but the short time between their deaths is interesting to me.
I couldn’t have learned what I did last year without death, may not have broken through my delicacy without granny, and yet, I’d bring her back, expel every lesson from me, if she could have her senses, if she could feel a blanket over her legs and turn her eyes to Monk on television again. That’s what she was doing the last time I saw her. I watched her watering eyes look at Monk without watching it, untouched food next to her, and I thought “This. This world is all she has known.” She also taught me the preciousness of the mundane.
I once knew paradox intellectually. Now, I feel it beyond rationality.
October, its curse, has been broken.
I’ve crawled out of the depths, to day, to night again, then, to green-bright brilliance. I’m in the gloaming now, I think.
My taste in horror has changed—clarified and altered to my individual nature. I have come to a more balanced, and ultimately, a more playful way of being.
It all lies in the balance of polarity, in the individual experiences that comprise the spectrum.
I delight in the human, really, the corporate-created, moneymoney, of Halloween. The shops. The themed drinks. Haunted Houses. Costumed bar crawls.
I roll my eyes at what America, where I am, has made of the season—a varnish over the amalgamation of cultures—and go towards the middle place.
I turn on atmospheric videos of pumpkin-filled libraries on YouTube, and I read nothing but horror, which leads me to thoughts of spirit. From there I go to the depths, to the dead.
We are capable of being in both places at this time of year. Meaning arises in the subconscious, somehow, even as one picks a tiny pumpkin from the bin at Publix.
I eat a skull-shaped Butterfinger and look into the night, fog cloaking asphalt, believing in a thinning veil.
I watch Terrifier, though the tone often hits the camp I seek, it’s not quite what I want (House is what I want). While I watch (spoiler!!) a woman being sawed in half starting at the crotch, I dream of creating a feminine horror character that isn’t a mother, isn’t just motivated by a hatred of men and what they’ve done to her. This dreaming is also of the season. It is magic because I am seeking to bring a thought to life, a typically spring/summer energy that is a shedding of used skin, a dying for me. I thought I had just come to life after so much death—internally and externally. Yet, death is numerous and unavoidable through the years.
I don’t take this process of death too seriously, though. Meaning, I roll with it.
Here. Finally. I will end where I had intended to begin. With what has become so dear to me in the horror genre. This becoming is also a returning, as so much of transformation is.
My love of the season began with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and The Nightmare Hour—fun, thrilling brushes with the dark that led to a brief period of writing for the joy of it, without thought of quality (I’m doing the same here). Now, I treasure cheesy horror, B horror, the untended campiness of mid century flicks. To me, they are the essence of life. The ridiculousness in the dark. The great joke of terror.
This isn’t to say the true horror of humanity is funny. In the midst of grief, I can laugh, but it isn’t to make light of it.
There is unfathomable pain in this world.
And there is joy, also terrifying, because it is fleeting.
The middle place, where our plane may lie, is beyond understanding. A place where it is all silly, scary, lovely, and self-serious, too. I struggle to articulate it. Do you feel what I mean?
October is a call for conscious participation in alchemy, which necessitates a foot in this human life and in the other, whatever that means for you.
I hope you enjoy the remainder of this month in your own way. I’ll be here, watching The Velvet Vampire and wishing for a sign of presence from those I’ve lost, knowing I’d think I’d lost my mind even if they slapped me in the face. Oh, how I wish they would.