(no subject)
Just looking at Google pictures of the Winchester Mansion wasn't enough; we both wanted to participate in an adventure.
"But it's almost midnight -- what is there to do in suburbia?" she asks. Nothing was the obvious answer, no self-respecting WASPs go out looking for non-home entertainment that late.
A sound though not entirely unique idea occurred to me: "We could go wander around a graveyard."
The next minute we were saddling up Li'l Spicy. Despite the fact that these things are practically rites of passage in pre-adulthood (one of the more minor rites, at that), neither of us had done it before, and by now we were both almost too old to get the same excitement out of it that any twelve-year-old could, and that we wanted to feel so badly. If we were drug addicts, we would have taken LSD for the purpose; instead, we played Phantom of the Opera on the car stereo and made a point of loudly noticing potentially creepy things, like the lack of stars or the mute thunder in the distance.
Once there, we parked in a residential area and walked over to the fence bordering the graveyard, looking for a likely entry point. We walked almost the whole perimeter. To some extent I guess we were looking for an obvious entrance, some open gate or knocked-down section of rail that would just say "oh please, break into me here!" There were no such spots, though. The fence was about seven feet high all around, and the occasional bent posts and mangled chains attested the obvious: that all our hoodlum predecessors had climbed it, and that we would have to do the same if we wanted to get in. The difficulty, of course, was that the fence ran parallel to both a road and a neighborhood.
"Wait -- are we actually going to do this?" she asked me. I should have heard and recognized the dangerous undertones of the wrong kind of fear in her voice: not the fear of vampires or zombies, which is the fear we were purposely chasing after, but the fear of the living. I knew I had to show confidence if anything interesting was to happen that night.
"Let's just do it," I said. Ah, peer pressure. She climbed the fence and immediately disappeared into the dark clumps of shadow. I followed her, rolling army style behind a headstone to wait for a nearby car to pass by. It passed, and then I couldn't see her anywhere, scanning all around the graves.
"Where are you?" I whispered.
"Over here. Do you see me?"
She was standing upright against a tree trunk, mostly hidden by branches, as though trying to meld her shadow with that of the topiary. I went over to join her.
"Oh my God, what the hell are we doing?!" she asked. Only now did I realize the danger in her voice. To counter it, I made myself purposely calm and nonchalant.
"What's wrong?"
"We just broke into a graveyard, and now we're right next to a path!!"
I looked where she was indicating. It was a little 3-foot-wide gravel walkway, a transport system between the different sections of the cemetery to make it easier for patrons to find their way around. Relatively harmless, I figured.
"There'll be security on it!" she said, almost screaming through her whisper.
I looked. There was nothing. "Security would have lights on them, and not make any attempt to be quiet. We'd know they were there long before they'd know we were."
She wasn't listening. "Quick! Go to that next tree!" She darted away, and I followed helplessly. Through this method of jolting 5-foot runs, we eventually made it to a more central part of the graveyard, where she agreed that we would symbolically read a gravestone. She picked the one closest to the tree she was hiding behind, pulled out cellphones and illuminated the name: a William M., died 1969. Trying to be funny, I patted the grass above him and thanked him for not trying to eat our brains. The fun was apparently over then, as she almost immediately ran back to a former tree, preparing to follow the same route back to the fence we had just crossed.
I should have been assertive. I should have said "Fuck your imaginary security patrols, we're not leaving until we see at least a banshee." But no; I didn't want to butt heads with her, so I followed. We hopped the fence again and were gone.
The whole ride home, driving past the electric lights of commerce and listening to the new undertones of exhausted relief in her voice, I felt angsty. Is this the state of adventures now? I wondered silently -- Are we too old, too realistic, too modern, for pretend games? There were no wandering security guards in that cemetery, I am almost convinced. And even if there were, shouldn't that have been the least of our concerns? Shouldn't we have been infinitely more worried about the werewolves and ghosts and demons, not because we consciously believed they were real, but because their imaginary presence was the whole reason for going there in the first place? We didn't -- or at least I certainly didn't -- come there just to put ourselves in danger of trespassing fines. We came there to tempt an invisible, subconscious, ethereal fate; to enter into a mindset where the greatest danger is something deliciously irrational, as an escape from the regular daylight mentality where you don't even think about goblins or poltergeists, not to mention care about whether they're hiding in the next shadow about to pounce.
I'm still a child, I suppose, to want to surrender so easily to these Never-Never lands of the mind, but to a greater extent it's part of a wavelength of profound dualistic clarity I've been traveling about lately -- the recognition of bounds of reality and the conflicts they have with my own desires, and then the building of a bridge over the gap.
I want to dress up like a pirate and build grand Jolly Roger ships in the trees of the greenbelt by my house. The problem really is, though, who do I have left to build them with me?
"But it's almost midnight -- what is there to do in suburbia?" she asks. Nothing was the obvious answer, no self-respecting WASPs go out looking for non-home entertainment that late.
A sound though not entirely unique idea occurred to me: "We could go wander around a graveyard."
The next minute we were saddling up Li'l Spicy. Despite the fact that these things are practically rites of passage in pre-adulthood (one of the more minor rites, at that), neither of us had done it before, and by now we were both almost too old to get the same excitement out of it that any twelve-year-old could, and that we wanted to feel so badly. If we were drug addicts, we would have taken LSD for the purpose; instead, we played Phantom of the Opera on the car stereo and made a point of loudly noticing potentially creepy things, like the lack of stars or the mute thunder in the distance.
Once there, we parked in a residential area and walked over to the fence bordering the graveyard, looking for a likely entry point. We walked almost the whole perimeter. To some extent I guess we were looking for an obvious entrance, some open gate or knocked-down section of rail that would just say "oh please, break into me here!" There were no such spots, though. The fence was about seven feet high all around, and the occasional bent posts and mangled chains attested the obvious: that all our hoodlum predecessors had climbed it, and that we would have to do the same if we wanted to get in. The difficulty, of course, was that the fence ran parallel to both a road and a neighborhood.
"Wait -- are we actually going to do this?" she asked me. I should have heard and recognized the dangerous undertones of the wrong kind of fear in her voice: not the fear of vampires or zombies, which is the fear we were purposely chasing after, but the fear of the living. I knew I had to show confidence if anything interesting was to happen that night.
"Let's just do it," I said. Ah, peer pressure. She climbed the fence and immediately disappeared into the dark clumps of shadow. I followed her, rolling army style behind a headstone to wait for a nearby car to pass by. It passed, and then I couldn't see her anywhere, scanning all around the graves.
"Where are you?" I whispered.
"Over here. Do you see me?"
She was standing upright against a tree trunk, mostly hidden by branches, as though trying to meld her shadow with that of the topiary. I went over to join her.
"Oh my God, what the hell are we doing?!" she asked. Only now did I realize the danger in her voice. To counter it, I made myself purposely calm and nonchalant.
"What's wrong?"
"We just broke into a graveyard, and now we're right next to a path!!"
I looked where she was indicating. It was a little 3-foot-wide gravel walkway, a transport system between the different sections of the cemetery to make it easier for patrons to find their way around. Relatively harmless, I figured.
"There'll be security on it!" she said, almost screaming through her whisper.
I looked. There was nothing. "Security would have lights on them, and not make any attempt to be quiet. We'd know they were there long before they'd know we were."
She wasn't listening. "Quick! Go to that next tree!" She darted away, and I followed helplessly. Through this method of jolting 5-foot runs, we eventually made it to a more central part of the graveyard, where she agreed that we would symbolically read a gravestone. She picked the one closest to the tree she was hiding behind, pulled out cellphones and illuminated the name: a William M., died 1969. Trying to be funny, I patted the grass above him and thanked him for not trying to eat our brains. The fun was apparently over then, as she almost immediately ran back to a former tree, preparing to follow the same route back to the fence we had just crossed.
I should have been assertive. I should have said "Fuck your imaginary security patrols, we're not leaving until we see at least a banshee." But no; I didn't want to butt heads with her, so I followed. We hopped the fence again and were gone.
The whole ride home, driving past the electric lights of commerce and listening to the new undertones of exhausted relief in her voice, I felt angsty. Is this the state of adventures now? I wondered silently -- Are we too old, too realistic, too modern, for pretend games? There were no wandering security guards in that cemetery, I am almost convinced. And even if there were, shouldn't that have been the least of our concerns? Shouldn't we have been infinitely more worried about the werewolves and ghosts and demons, not because we consciously believed they were real, but because their imaginary presence was the whole reason for going there in the first place? We didn't -- or at least I certainly didn't -- come there just to put ourselves in danger of trespassing fines. We came there to tempt an invisible, subconscious, ethereal fate; to enter into a mindset where the greatest danger is something deliciously irrational, as an escape from the regular daylight mentality where you don't even think about goblins or poltergeists, not to mention care about whether they're hiding in the next shadow about to pounce.
I'm still a child, I suppose, to want to surrender so easily to these Never-Never lands of the mind, but to a greater extent it's part of a wavelength of profound dualistic clarity I've been traveling about lately -- the recognition of bounds of reality and the conflicts they have with my own desires, and then the building of a bridge over the gap.
I want to dress up like a pirate and build grand Jolly Roger ships in the trees of the greenbelt by my house. The problem really is, though, who do I have left to build them with me?