Satan’s Little Helper

I have a terrible cold and feel like my head's underwater and everyone sounds like the adults on Peanuts; I’m hosting a huge Halloween party for a bunch of 4th graders and their families in 6 days; and I’m buried in midterm grading, so now is the time to write something.

That didn’t last long, now it’s Christmas and no one will want a "Halloween-y" story.

Now it’s days after Christmas and people are in the In-Between, kind of like the Upside Down but lacking a Demogorgon. Perhaps the Christmas hangovers and the “please, just let 2017 be over” feelings will create a space for this semi-macabre blurb. I guess we’ll see---I don’t want to wait until next Halloween.

Okay, now it’s 2018, damnit!

Today the high is 17 degrees and the low, with wind chill, is -29, so I’m laughing about the way I began this all the way back in October:

Autumn [what I now see as the seasonal gateway to the dreaded frozen In Between] is my favorite time of year. For some reason, for me, it inspires both cozy [laughing] and corrupted thoughts. The changing of the light casts shadows that make the twilight hours even more mysterious. The crisp chill and changing light beautifully blends with fiery golds and bursting reds, and the air assumes that “cider woods” and “rustic pumpkin" candle smell [oh, the memories of 50-degree warmth].

During [the balminess of] October, one of my favorite activities is running (well, er, jogging, jaunting… or walking) around the gravel driveway circling my house while listening to the Lore podcast (“Sometimes the truth is more frightening than fiction”). I used to go for runs on the open rural roads, but my true crime obsession put a stop to that insanely risky behavior. So now I just stick to my own little rocky track and listen to stories about ghosts, witches, and monsters (both human and other). The podcast with its haunting piano soundtrack and spooky subject matter accompanies autumn’s twilight hours perfectly and the mosaic of leaves covering the road makes the farm look like a New England Sleepy Hollow.  This ambiance, of course, fuels my imagination. One time I went as far as envisioning the driveway as a fairy circle, like the one on the Spiderwick Chronicles--a circle of salt around the house that produces a protection spell keeping the goblins out. Alas, the spell hasn’t worked as a few goblins have sat at my dining room table. I think of such fantasy (the fairy circle not the goblins) when I repetitively meander my way past the northern grove of trees just outside of the circle. I guess, the deep pockets of darkness also inspire magical thinking.

Years ago, I told my friend’s daughter, who was all of 7, that spirits and gnomes lived in the grove trees and that the giant mound of dirt covering an old septic dump was actually a dead and buried troll. I even showed her a giant cow skull my brother had nailed to a tree (years prior he and his pre-teen friends built their own little hobo village in the grove, complete with fire pits, winding trails, ponds turned mosquito hatcheries, and animal bone displays). We also found an old lamp-like thing, and I convinced her a genie was likely inside it. As I told her about the troll, showed her the skull, and discussed the wishes we’d ask the genie to fulfill,  her little-girl eyes opened wider with each tale, and a twinge of guilt hit me. Was I cultivating imagination or just lying? She believed the stories for quite some time--maybe she still believes portions of them. In fact, I hope a little part of her does. But now she’s fifteen and has moved on to more horrific teenager things---which brings me to the reason for my title “Satan’s Little Helper.”

In 1991, my best friend and I were obsessed with the television show Dark Shadows: The Revival. We’d always had wild imaginations, so the show was right up our alley. Not to mention, it also satisfied our hormonal curiosity. We were 14 (if she reads this, this is when she’ll be telling the screen she’s actually one year younger) and Barnabas was our vampire crush. Every week we’d look forward to the opening scenes of the winding train heading towards the castle on a cliff, waves pushing up against the rocks below. I’m sure we promptly phoned each other after each episode to discuss the supernatural soap opera’s latest mystery, murder, or reveal. I’d love to watch it now and laugh at its ridiculousness---I just googled episode one. Wow. But, for two teenage girls who lived on farms in the middle of nowhere, it was exceptional television---and, in my opinion, far more sophisticated than Twilight.

We’d always had active imaginations. Sometime around the age of 8, I was convinced that a vampire lived in our corn crib. The bunk at the back of the creaky building, a wooden partition about 8 feet long and 3 feet wide, terrified me. The wall of the bunk was too high for me to see over, so because it was the perfect size for a coffin, I was certain that a country Count Dracula slept there during daylight hours. I now envision my child self peeking around the corn crib door, my sunlit, blonde pig-tailed head a stark contrast to the darkness inside. I’d stare at that bunk and imagine the vampire within it. The vampire, who would wander the farm at night, was just waiting for someone to invite him in. One day, my curiosity could not be controlled, and I mustered the courage to walk to the back of the corn crib and climb up the old barn-wood coffin container. I vividly remember trying to get a foothold between the grey boards and struggling to get to the top, fully prepared to see the grotesque creature sleeping among the cobs. When I finally managed to peer over the edge, I was actually disappointed when all I saw were dried up husks and cobwebs.

Around that same time, my friend and I were also introduced to the hermit of Union Grove. The local lore was that a scary old man lived in a cave in the park near her house. He was clothed in dirty furs and survived on fish and squirrels. I think my aunt even said she saw him, but maybe that was her version of the buried, septic-tank troll. We conjured our own stories about how he followed hikers, hiding in the trees, and I assume someone was horrifically murdered at some point in our storymaking. In addition to the hermit, we also believed that a black panther hung out along the creek (or “crick”) in the park---the creek also passed right behind my friend’s home. Somehow we caught a few episodes of Manimal and this inspired our panther fantasy. The show followed the adventures of a wealthy crime-solving shapeshifter, and all I can remember is one incredible scene of him turning into a black panther in the back of a limousine. It was terrifying (for different reasons than it it is now). And so, after such entertainment, we were fairly certain that a panther (shapeshifter or not) roamed the ravine behind her home. One day, in her clubhouse, an old outhouse with Hello Kitty stickers posted on the inside, we heard scratching on the tin roof---the black panther! We talked about how we would escape; it was serious business. The only way to survive would be to outrun him--we’d have to make it to the house before he could eat us. Like the time I peered into the corn crib bunk, my memory of this experience is extremely sharp. My heart nearly burst as my chubby kid legs awkwardly propelled me to the small white farmhouse. It was a miracle we survived. (Later, we considered the possibility that the noise was tree branches rubbing against the outhouse roof, but we never completely ruled out the existence of the panther.)

  

Eighties pop culture also caused us to believe in lizard aliens. During our play dates, we became characters in the television show V. When we weren’t in the Hello Kitty Shitter, an old, abandoned corn bin with small trees pushing through the cracked cement floor, was our home base. The silo was a cage-like bin; you could see through it. We’d climb up the walls yelling about the lizard aliens attack. The barn loft served as their lair. As I write this now, I wonder how we watched these shows! I always remember my parents being so strict about the media my brother and I consumed. How did I get to to watch Manimal and V when I was only 2nd grader? I’m sure I sneaked peaks because I remember watching the limo-man-panther scene while I was standing in my apple green carpeted bedroom.

So, back to where I began, circa 1991.

Continuing our curious endeavors, the same friend and I became infatuated with Reader’s Digest’s Strange Stories and Amazing Facts, courtesy of my grandmother’s library, I think. I’d haul the big red book to school and during study breaks or in the halls, we’d pour over the tales of werewolves and Egyptian mummies. Every page gave us exciting weird facts our inquiring minds wanted to know. From Atlantis to Uri Geller, the subjects fed our appetites for knowledge of the mysterious and odd. However, the book was not appreciated by all. In fact, many of our 8th-grade peers considered it the satanic bible.The same kids who were playing spin the bottle in the storage closet, decided that the hefty crimson book, published by Reader’s Digest, was a spellbook for evil. Suddenly, my friend and I became known as Satan and Satan’s Little Helper. Because I brought the book to school, I was Satan (perhaps a little part of me found this flattering). After a brief stint arguing the fact that we were not, in fact, conjurers of evil, we decided to humorously go with the hype---perhaps this was just our coping mechanism to convince ourselves we weren’t actually being ridiculed by our pubescent peers. Of course, not fitting in, in the 8th grade would be far worse than being attacked by Country Count Dracula or the man panther.

We ditched the book, but this occurrence probably lead me to amazing fashion choices like wearing pewter dragon earrings and black Zoso t-shirts. I think I even turned our brush with the “bad” social classification into my advantage when I hit a wall of depression----I could use my dark imagination for drawing eyeballs onto moons and women wearing capes blowing in the wind. I remember I taped a number of these artistic gems to the wall right under the shelf lined with my Clearly Candian bottle collection. Uff da.

But, some time before high school, the innocence of our curiosity completely soured. It became something bad, something wrong. I wonder if this “wrongness” just aligned with my inner feelings of wrongness and my curiosity simply adapted. These were times when I felt I wasn’t fitting in---I wasn’t thinking like everyone else. I’m sure everyone feels this in varying degrees during their coming of age. But my imagination somehow made it worse. I just remember that I was really bored and depressed in rural South Dakota. My friend and I ended up turning to other things to satisfy our curiosity and need for excitement, things like sneaking out, going to parties, and meeting under the overpass to smoke cigarettes.

So, I aligned my imagination and curiosity with being a bad person. I wonder now how much of it was actually the fact that we were girls who shouldn’t have been so curious or if my ideas about myself just became corrupted.

I’m not sure which came first, the judgy chicken or the depression egg.

Excerpt from "The Book"

Incredibly, I struggled with this for quite some time. In my twenties, I remember worrying, that if I died, my family would find my Ed Gein biography and be incredibly disappointed in me. To this day, a little part of me sometimes feels that  my dates with Friday night Dateline mean that I’m indulging in something grotesque. When I began binging on the My Favorite Murder podcast while driving myself and my 8 year old 12 hours across the desolate lands of South Dakota and Montana , I felt that it was somehow wrong---sure it wasn’t the best choice because I became convinced we were destined to be murdered by an antique pickup driving, dirt covered, tobacco chewing, psycho perv, but I felt like I had to keep my fascination with the podcast a secret. But why?

I do know that indulging in too much of something can affect thought processes, and I do believe that society has become overly infatuated with gore and shock value---but that’s never been my interest. I like to observe and try to figure out why and how people do what they do. I try to comprehend the incomprehensible. And here’s the thing I think we all need to remember, learning is not satanic. Ha! Having an analytical mind that wants to try to figure out the mysteries of our world and human nature should never be a shameful thing. How we treat one another is what’s important and, dare I say it, maybe seriously trying to figure out what turns people into “monsters” would actually benefit our society. Too much time is spent judging and not enough time is spent trying to understand. It took me too long to figure out that understanding is not the same thing as condoning and that thinking should never be shameful. What if we tried understanding each other instead of ridiculing and punishing each other? What if we saw ourselves as human nature investigators instead of just human evaluators? Well, that’s where I’m at---and I’m signing off now because this is becoming too preachy, and I have to get ready for work in the real world.

I’m not Satan, and she’s not Satan’s Little Helper, but what if we were? [laughing]  

Have an imagination in the new year! I plan on it---right now I’m imagining edits and how I will respond to negative reviews. ;)

Yay! I finished some writing before Halloween 2018!