...oh the horror...

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“The monster was the best friend I ever had.”

-Boris Karloff-

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I have decided to dress as nothing for Halloween. Nothing is as scary as nothing.  Some of my greatest moments of paralyzed terror and fear have been spent gawping my own personal nullity of void.  I peer into an endless hole and the soul leaves me a sloppy trashsack skinbag asleep snoring on a sofa. 

Inside of my void I consider death and I die. How many of my brothers and sisters lay slain in my dad’s sock drawer, shown false life in front of a Farrah Fawcett poster?  Was I dead before I ever lived?  Can I live without death?

I might be a zombie.

The egg is the biggest cell in a body, and the only one visible to the eye.  So naturally humans would be made by severing that ocular orb with some blind wormed beast. Life is terrifying. We begin as the wet spelch of two ugly bits baking human shakshuka, the result of two genitals having a dirty conversation. And after a worm consummates cosmos, we cook for nine months, vampire blobs building form through a succubal relationship of parasitical communion.  Someone’s balls touched a taint so now they will have to deal with us. Kicking and screaming we bleed coneheaded out of the same hole we started. If we stayed any longer we would never be able to leave.  Then with our only choices life or death, we exit raw out an orifice where our makers share with us hope that we go work in an office. 

Terrifying.

Halloween arrives annually, man’s greatest designated excuse to be someone else.  Most days I help myself to self helping myself, some mildly focused version of what I think I am, poorly played out by what I am actually am.

I am the human equivalent of someone named Amy doing a one woman monologue called I am “A ME”.  But on Halloween I am Amanda, read like a truly stupid pun (a man, duh) so as to force this monologue towards a musing more meaningful than CansaFis is afraid of voids.

I am afraid of myself. The monsters inside of me are scarier than any mask someone might buy at Tony’s Terror Town down on 3rd street. As much as I wish I was staring at a void, I can’t avoid (barf) that the void has always been welled up as an endless bore inside of me. I am not so much a void as I contain one. The mirror gives me proof that I’m here, but at night I shut my eyes, and there I go, gone to incomprehensible exhibits of existence unhinged and unhooked from gravity's grounding.  I dream I’m a demon, I dream I’m a dog, I dream I’m a saw cutting straight through the log.

I am afraid I can’t share my fears with you, for my fears are my weakness and the weak are meant to be mangled by the monsters we don’t contain.  I’m afraid I can’t show you how dark and endless that void is, how horrifyingly vacant its vantablack blankness, and how silently simple it's never spoken sounds sound.  I contain a nothingness so empty you might only find within it the repeated and looped final scenes of Seinfeld, and Jerry’s ominous warnings that more might be to come¹

I am afraid of what the void looks like when it is no longer lost, when it exits and presents itself.  It wants to write onto this page, to be seen sharing its vacancy.  But I can control it so I do.  My interior desolation is accessible but avoidable. I leave the void to hide and hibernate.  Nothing becomes nothing.  I name my void to make it less scary.  I call my void Lloyd.

My emptiness is not my only monster.  I have at least 26 abominations conveniently alphabetized for maximum listability² Anxiety is my apparition and boredom my banshee.  Childhood my curse and depression my demon.  I name my monsters not to give them life, but to accept they are living.  Hidden they are harmful, they fester and breed.  Out in the open the terrors that tear at me take on a less troubling tone.  Their wails and shrieks simply ask me trick or treat.  So I welcome my mummies and medusas and fill their bags with candy.  If my anger is a wolfman, he’ll leave happier with a KitKat.  

The streets filled with vampires, werewolves, witches and frankensteins, Halloween inspires in me an opportunity to attune to these horrors of myself.  I let the TV screen scream and revel in the Raven’s croak.  I introduce Andy my anxiety to Phil my Paranoia and watch them sip scotch with Sandy Sadness who just broke up with Danny Depression.  It’s never lonely when your fear can befriend itself.  

But I also want to be surrounded in the spirits of others, the camaraderie of our personal curses dancing nude round a bonfire, the full moon illuminating our individual ills. I am no longer afraid of the void, its endlessness is just an entrance to association.  We are all boys and ghouls. I’m guessing you have monsters of your own.  Inexplicable infinite icks you costume and mask.  

Maybe it’s the season and I am just seeking spooks, but I peer into the void again and no longer see nothing.  I see you.  I see endless yous ready to scare me.  We can all be Amy or Lloyd, but no one ever can be nothing.

So I’ll take my costume off and I’ll share with you that the scariest book I ever read was written by a muppet named Grover.  In 24 pages he implored me to quit turning them, warning that if I got to the end of his story there would be a monster waiting for me.  And sure enough at the final page there he stood. My author, my narrator was the very monster that waited for me.  Me was my monster and still is.

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“I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.”

-Michel de Montaigne-

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FOOTENOTES

1. https://deadline.com/2023/10/julia-louis-dreyfus-seinfeld-reboot-tuesday-1235573622/

2. Anxiety is my apparition 
Boredom my banshee
Childhood my curse 
Depression my demon
Error is my enemy
Fetish my fiend
Gambling my ghoul
Hate is my hobgoblin
Insomnia is my imp
Jokes are my jabberwocky
Kleptomania my krampus
Lies are my lycanthropes
Mood is my minotaur
Narcissism is my nymph
Obsession my ogre
Pain is my phantom
Questions my Quetzalcoatl
Restlessness my revenant
Sadness my spook
Technology my troll
Understanding my undead
Void is my vampire
Worry is my wraith
X is my only exit because i have no x word disorders
Youth is my yeti
Zoom meetings are my zombie