Dates, Fun, & Dancing

Dates, Fun, & Dancing:

And Other Not-so-innocent Horror Stories

A little more than a decade ago, the King put together a collection of stories. The order in which the stories appear in his book was dictated by a stack of cards that he dealt to himself in a solitary sort of spontaneous tarot ritual. Apparently, it worked.

From the cover of Everything's Eventual

One of the things I remember from that collection of stories was the voice in the foreword. The introduction mentions something it refers to as the practice of an almost lost art. 

Here's a peripheral slip-thought to entertain.

Maybe the best things in life are those that induce overwhelming feelings of apprehension. There is one particular sensation that can be described as a perpetual state of almost losing. There's a rush that comes with realizing that we’ve got to do something. And quick. Yes, quick, before the bitter-sweet 'oh-my-god-it-might-be-too-late' feeling has us drooling all over the place. Okay, maybe just me. 

In the introduction, Stephen talks about the almost lost art of short stories. Yeah, short stories. Short stories that are understood as one-of-a-kind items only found in artisan’s shops. But these stories are not given out to just anybody. Short story artisans only deal to those who have the patience of a connoisseur and strength to keep their addiction demons in line. Each tale holds the potential for a jump to a place that gives a hyper-space kind of high:

Those jumps to warp speed take us a little further out than we’ve ever been before. But the reward is only for those who can wait. Patiently.

Blogs, blogging, or reading blogs can be like that.

Okay, maybe it is just me. Or not.

Back to the book.

Somewhere in those first few pages of foreplay, there’s mention of discreet, yet fancy, airport lounges populated by handsomely-suited husbands well versed in powerful and persuasive lies from the canon of busy-busy businessmen literature such as The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Cheese Movers. Always on the move, those business-minded husbands are already dressed up for their undertaking - that which awaits those who are rush-rushing toward their 401(k) heart-attacks, promising rewards for their wives who obliviously know better. Wives whose passionate vows tend to sound something like, “Till death do us part, dahhhling!”

In trying to keep with the 'eco' spirit of ISO 14001, 
my wife has been instructed to only attempt a resuscitation on me 
with a solar-charged AED. Either that or a blow-job.
 

Busy people, shorter stories, and that nasty-bad habit of blogging. 

Look, the trash-to-treasure ratio (T3) in the blogosphere’s asteroid belt is pretty daunting. It seems like at least half the people drifting out (t)here are hoping for that big lottery win, the chance discovery that makes them rich, famous, and shameless. Sometimes I wonder why the cyber-space jockeys (junkies?) don’t quit while they are already ahead by one. The mere aspiration for shamelessness is more than enough for me. 

Just ask Wifey.

"See...she's telling me I'm a 'winner'!"

Which brings our orbit back to the point of this post. 

Everything…literally everything that I come across, whether I want it to or not, has the potential to weave itself into a fantastical soil-your-loins kind of scary story. Without even having to think, it just happens. The mind has an annoying habit of making connections where there are none. That's why I wear diapers from time to time. Not just for the bragging rights either.

Look. Gotta level with ya.

All of this 'joking' is really my way of trying to make light of when I relapsed and put myself through one of those more subtle moments of horror. A moment drifted up roughly a year after March 11, 2011. A rare instance when everything s-l-o-w-e-d waaaay down. In an instant, the spin and pull of gravity was suddenly hard to escape. I couldn't run. No, not a dream.

Feeling the creep of getting ready to almost lose something, I consciously noted that my feet were tingling, that sweat was beginning to collect on my forehead, and my heart was beating in my throat...because the weight in hand felt just about too right.

One of voices in my head, one that wasn't laughing, screamed "Tell me this isn't fucking happening!" The following internal dialogue came after a few longer moments of nervous silence.

Edges, Weight, and a Beckoning Whisper

Below are the three tarot cards from what started out as a sunny, once-upon-a-walk-along-the-beach kind of afternoon:

I. Edges

One was missing...

"Hey, let yourself go. Just go with it." I was telling myself, "The coolest stuff washes up on shore all the time. Picking up other people's garbage can be fun. We can make it a game. C'mon give it a try. Everything's a clue. All you have to do is just figure out what happened. See..."

II. Weight

The glove that was not empty...

No, that tattered glove was not empty. I thought it was. But when I reached down to grab it, everything was suddenly 3-D and technicolor. Tingling, sweating, hard to swallow, what the fuuuh...? I'm sinking. I could feel the weight of some hapless fisherman's hand who'd been unlucky enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The high tides had brought this ashore. The dead-fish handshake was ebbing. An hourglass of sand started spilling from the glove's wrist. I went ahead and tipped it up, to empty whatever might have been lodged in there, giving it just the right amount of weight. Then...it was light as a feather. Son-of-a-bitch. That son of a bitch! 

On the way home, an odd combination of discards had me distracted. Anything to take my mind off of what I'd almost seen. 

And there he was again.

III. Beckoning whisper

It looks kind of dark down there...


* * * * *


Well, it freaked me out. 
 

I'd really hate the guy if he didn't have such a messed up sense of humor.

Creep