The Screaming Room

While Mark is still frolicking in the woods of Vermont, he left me this post for you all to ponder.  Happy Halloween!!   

I wrote the following script for a Halloween performance in Vermont called “The Haunted Forest.” A dead woman named Julia is summoned from the grave, blah blah blah. Now that it’s show time, they invited me out and offered to put me up in a local bed and breakfast. Very cool. I called the B&B this afternoon to make sure we were all booked in. The owner of the place knew who I was immediately and said: “I wanted you to know that my mother’s name was Julia and she lived in this house all her life. You may get to meet her when you’re least expecting it.”

So I guess I’m saying I may never come back from my trip. Vive the Lost Sole!

The Haunted Forest, 2006

“Julia”

Characters – 4:

Professor Bloodsworth;

Young, recently deceased Julia;

Two long dead Julias.

Costumes:

Bloodsworth: Tweed jacket, corduroys, a tie hung askew;

Young Julia: A white gown, powder or cream for the freshly dead pallor;

Long dead Julias: Rags that seem to drip from the body, gnarled hair, skeletal faces.

Props:

Headstones, crosses, dead flowers;

A simple pocket compass. A small box with dials.

Strobe light, sheet metal for thunder sound, fog machine

Set:

A small cemetery plot at the edge of the woods.

Scene:

On the night of the waning moon in late October, Professor Bloodsworth is back in the Vermont woods at the small graveyard where lies buried his beloved daughter Julia. Half insane with grief, disheveled and haggard, Bloodsworth stumbles to the tiny cemetery. We can hear him sobbing as he approaches the graves. In pain and exhaustion, he falls to his knees in front of a headstone that looks newer than the rest.

Bloodsworth: “All my life I’ve committed to science. And now this! Now my beloved daughter is dead!” and sobs at the graveside a little longer.

Bloodsworth, raising his head again and shaking a fist: “I dedicated my life to unraveling the mysteries of the universe! Tonight I will summons the power of the cosmos and the secrets of gravity!

He stands, arms upraised, beseeching the sky.

Bloodsworth, shouting: “Julia!”

He pulls a compass from a pocket and checks the dial. He adjusts the dial on a small box he has carried here with him. He considers the sky once more.

Bloodsworth: “Julia! Come back to me! The moon is right! All the powers of the universe are aligned! Return to me, Julia. Return while the window is open!”

There is a flash of light and a sharp crack from the trees, like thunder and lightening that has come from somewhere other than the sky. Bloodsworth stumbles back. Fog rolls from the trees and he shields his eyes. He rights himself and stares at the trees beyond his daughter’s grave.

And she emerges from the darkness. She is pale with dark hair hanging over her face, but unmistakably Julia. She shuffles as if in a daze from the trees. The white gown seems to glow. She turns her gaunt face up toward her father, who waits with outstretched arms.

Bloodsworth: “Julia!”

She takes a few shuffling steps closer, staring and holding her own arms out.

Young Julia, in a flat, lifeless tone: “Yes. Julia. I am Julia.”

Bloodsworth, in a swoon, collapses to the ground and groans with unimaginable relief. On his knees, he holds his arms wide and waits for his treasured daughter to come to him.

Bloodsworth: “Julia! My darling. You’ve come back to me. We will be together always.”

Julia ambles closer. Closer. Closer still. And then, another sharp crack of thunder. Blinding light from the trees. A shadow emerges from the darkness.

This one is dressed darkly, with cloth in rags seeming to drip from the body. The face is bloodless and gaunt, a mere film of old flesh against bone. The mouth is a skeletal rictus. The dead woman stumbles from the woods with even less grace than the younger girl. Her arms are outstretched and her voice and thick and wet.

Long Dead Julia: “Julia,” she croaks in that gargling voice. “I am Julia.”

Young Julia collapses into her father’s arms, screaming. He is also screaming. But there is more thunder. There is another flash of light. And another ghoulish figure steps from the trees, her cerements rotting and flapping in the wind. She comes shuffling across the graveyard, moaning and reaching with black boned fingers. Her voice is even more brittle than that of the corpse who came before her. It is the voice of graveyard dirt.

Long dead Julia number two: “I… am… Julia…”

Long dead Julia number one: “Julia. I am Julia. Who has called me forth?”

And the dead women shuffle forth and then fall upon the screaming pair at the edge of the young girl’s grave. There is screaming and biting and ripping. There is more thunder and more lightening as more dead Julias respond to the call. But for the grieving father Bloodsworth, the final darkness has fallen, and the light fades from the scene.

Just the sound of “home invasion” sends a shudder up my spine.  Earlier this year, a punk in my neighborhood tried breaking into my home, while I was there.  The only reason why he didn’t make it in was because on the other side of the door he heard one ferocious-sounding dog barking and another dog barking (playfully as he chased his tail-but he didn’t know that) at the door.  Lucky for me, he was afraid of dogs.  But it made me think, what if the next robber wasn’t?  What would I do?  He never made it into my house, but what would I have done if he had?  My home, my safe place for the last 10 years,  had changed, it was now vunerable.  Locked doors and windows can only protect you a little.  If someone wants to get in bad enough, they’re coming in.  What do you do?  Do I pick up the phone, a golf club or a gun?  Sounds like the guy in this article had the right idea.  Anyone in here ever been the victim of a home invasion?  How did you feel afterwards?  And if not, what would you do if it happened to you?

MACCLENNY, FL — Police say a suspect was shot early Thursday morning by a man who was protecting his home and his pregnant wife.

Police are calling it a home invasion robbery.

A 17-year-old boy is in police custody, while his brother is in the hospital in critical condition.

Friends locked up the gate Thursday afternoon to the Macclenny home that will never feel the same for Jody Paul Thrift and his pregnant wife Sabrina.

Baker County Sheriff Joey Dobson says early Thursday morning, Jody Paul got up to get some water, and noticed his lights were out. But the power was still on at the house next door.

“So he knew that something was up,” Sheriff Dobson said.

Dobson says Richard Munoz and his 17-year-old brother had cut the power and phone lines to the house.

Dobson says the pair then took a boat anchor from a shed and hurled it through a glass door.

“So [the victim] went to his bedroom, retrieved his firearm, [and] waited in his bedroom,” Dobson said.

“And as [the suspect] opened the door, [Thrift] saw a flashlight, a little, small flashlight, and he began to fire. And he shot at the suspect, and the suspect fell right in his bedroom door,” Dobson said.

As three Baker County deputies sped to the scene, they say they came across the younger suspect, scrambling through the woods toward the getaway car.

Deputies put him under arrest.

Sheriff Dobson says the older suspect, Richard Munoz, was carrying a cocked and loaded pistol with him the whole time.

In fact, when deputies found Munoz on the floor of the house, they say he was still trying to reach for his gun.

There’s no word yet on why the Thrift family may have been a target.

Police are investigating whether the suspect ever fired his gun inside the home. He is in critical condition at Shands Jacksonville.

Lately I’ve been into Dracula. Not the vampire necessarily, but the 15th century tyrant Prince Vlad Dracul, hideously known as “Vlad the Impaler” to his intimates. Now there was a fun guy. In his battle for control of Romania, Dracul was known to display the bodies of his enemies impaled on stakes. Thousands upon thousands of bodies propped up before the castle like a forest of savagery.
The impaling process doesn’t sound like any fun at all. The lucky sufferers were the ones who were simply speared through the mid-section. They were raised on sharpened sticks which would slide through their innards with relative quickness. I say relative because there was another form of impaling that made for a much longer, much more painful death.
I don’t believe there is an official term for it. What it was involved was impaling the doomed man with not sharp stick but a blunt pole, which had been greased to slide into the anus. When the pole was upraised, it moved slowly into the body, through viscera, the organs and everything else. From what I understand, it could take days before the wooden staff made its way through the body and exited through the shoulder. Some victims were said to have lived for days with the agony.
Short of burning, I can think of few methods of human violation that would be more painful. Of course, there is no limit to the variety of atrocities that can be committed upon a living thing. The many horrors of the Nazi concentration camps — the experiments and pointless cruelty — verify that man has not only the means but the intellect to inflict unspeakable pain upon his fellow man.
Something worth pondering in a season that conjures images of both the fictious and delicious Count Dracula and evil of the real world. And a widely publicized news story just to make it serve as a nearly clever segue.
WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney wasn’t referring to the controversial interrogation method of “water boarding” when he called dunking terror suspects in water “a very important tool” for obtaining information, the White House insisted Friday. White House spokesman Tony Snow, however, was unable to clarify what Cheney did mean in a Tuesday radio interview in which the vice president said that dunking detainees in water was “a no-brainer” if it saved American lives.
In water boarding, a subject is strapped down and his head is held under water or his mouth and nose are smothered by a cloth soaked in water to induce a sensation of drowning. The technique was used by the Spanish Inquisition in the Middle Ages and the Japanese against American prisoners of war during World War II.
In the radio interview, with WDAY of Fargo, N.D., interviewer Scott Hennen said callers had told him that they thought “dunking a terrorist in water” was acceptable if it saved lives. Cheney responded: “I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, that’s been a very important tool that we’ve had to be able to secure the nation.”
He then was asked: “Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?”
“It’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture,” Cheney replied, adding that, “We don’t torture.”

One Halloween, my brother and I went into Salem, Mass for some Mardis Gras-esque fun and heavy drinking. I went in a costume that cost me three months of work and maybe seventy five bucks to pull together. My brother, an admitted slacker, whipped his outfit into shape five minutes before we set off for Witch City. He put on some dark shades, grabbed a walking stick, and hung a sign around his neck that said “Venice.” He was a Venitian blind. Guess who got the most attention that night?

Bastard.

This year, I had the disadvantage of having my Halloween costume published in the paper two weeks before the big night. So much for the veil of secrecy. The cannibal clown has been exposed and on Saturday, he’ll take his flesh-munching ass off to deep, dark Vermont for some haunted B&B action.

Last year in Lisbon, a man dressed as a giant tampon went to a party and caught fire. I am not making this up. We covered the story but the writer was fooled into believing the man had been wearing a sheep costume.

One time I dressed as Dracula and climbed into a wooden coffin in order to scare arriving guests. Drunk beyond repair, I decided it would be a fine idea to light up a cigarette even while I was entombed. It wasn’t. I’ll spare you the details.

I welcome your stories of costume genius or embarassment, preferably the latter. If you’re a guy who dressed up as a chick one year and then never went back, that’s okay. We will not judge you. And we suspected all along.

Meanwhile, here’s what happens when you try to don a perfectly clever costume in the halls of paranoia.

Captain Underpants has battled talking toilets and Professor Poopypants, but he was no match for a high school principal who banned students from dressing up as the children’s book character.
Long Beach High School Principal Nicholas Restivo took the action Wednesday after three 17-year-old girls wore beige leotards and nude stockings under white briefs and red capes on the school’s Superhero Day.
“Yes, I know they weren’t naked,” Restivo said. “But the appearance was that they were naked.”
Chelsea Horowitz, one of the dressed-up girls, had a problem with that logic. “They’re not see-through or anything,” said Horowitz, an honor student and softball player. “All the teachers thought it was cute.”

Those Sun Journal guys are sneaky dogs. I had no idea they had sneaked in a function where readers can post comments in reaction to a news story. The whole thing snuck up on me. In fact, I knew nothing of it at all until one of you alert bloggers called to tell me I was being trashed in there.

Perhaps “trashed” is a strong word. I was mostly being chastised like a school boy for using the word “snuck” when I probably meant “sneaked.” Probably. And later, a woman with a low, throaty whisper left a message on my phone saying, in effect (or affect?): “I normally love what you write. But I can’t take it anymore. Snuck is not a word! Do not ever use that word again!”

She may spoken in the smoky voice of a sex line operator, but I think she was serious. Use sneak one more time, mister, and the next thing to sneak up on you will be a bullet between your shoulder blades. I think I need a security team. Who’s with me? I say, who’s with me? Anyone? Little help over here…

But I digress. If there’s one thing I miss about being part of the Sun Journal blog — and there are few — it’s being displayed so publicly, we’re almost vulnerable. Here in The Screaming Room, it’s like a familiar, well-lit bar, where we post bouncers at the doors and invite in only members of our exclusive club.

Back at the SJ, we were out there in a roadhouse along a dusty road, where any psychopath with an Internet connection could reel in with hate in his blood and a razor blade in his shoe. Or HER shoe, as was often the case.

We don’t get many strangers around these parts. The people who want to come at us with broken bottles or brass knuckles don’t know we exist at all. And it’s too bad, because we’ve always welcomed those loveable brawlers. And sometimes dammit, we miss them.

Only occasionally do I join the volleys of debate in here when it comes to matters of politics and war. But now that crazy, yellow family from Springfield is involved so I feel more at ease. Is it appropriate for the show creators to express their views on the war in Iraq? Sure, it is. And it’s their right. Will it be funny? Chances are good, though they’ve struggled in recent years.

Oct. 23, 2006 — It happens every year about now. “The Simpsons,” that animated money-making satire on Fox TV, airs its “Treehouse of Horror” episode to coincide with Halloween — or at least as close to the holiday as possible, given the uncertainties of the World Series.
But this year the show is scheduled to air the first week in November, two days before the midterm congressional election, and it has caused more of a stir than usual.
A synopsis helps explain why. The segment, titled “The Day the Earth Was Stupid,” is a takeoff on Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 radio broadcast, “The War of The Worlds.”
Dig out your history books. Welles’ broadcast caused widespread panic back then, despite repeated assurances that it was fiction.
Back to the future. In the Simpson’s version, the confusion the radio broadcast created sets the stage for an invasion by Kang and Kodos, the lime-green aliens who have appeared in every Halloween, sorry — “Treehouse Horror” special. The parallels to the U.S. occupation of Iraq are not subtle.
After the aliens destroy Springfield, home to the Simpson clan, they talk about the invasion and the occupation that will follow. “Well, the Earthlings continue to resent our presence,” Kang says. “You said we’d be greeted as liberators!”
“Don’t worry,” says Kodos. “We still have the people’s hearts and minds.” In the show’s characteristic over-the-top sarcasm, Kodos then holds up a brain and heart.
“I don’t know,” says Kang. “I’m starting to think ‘Operation Enduring Occupation’ was a bad idea.”
Kodos disagrees. “We had to invade. They were working on weapons of mass disintegration.”
As the two survey the smoking ruins of their town, Kang deadpans the last line of the segment. “This sure is a lot like Iraq will be.”
The show’s executive producer, Al Jean, has said he’s not sure whether that last line will be broadcast. Some of the writers apparently want it cut. “The debate is whether people already get it, and we’re being too obvious,” he told Radaronline, insisting there was no pressure from Fox. “They didn’t have any objection to this, ” he said.
The possibility of Fox objecting is not surprising, given the politics favored by Rupert Murdoch, Fox’s corporate chairman. He’s conservative, even though he has been described lately as “drifting left.” And, of course, there’s the timing. The episode comes on the eve of the congressional elections, and it’s been suggested that the show’s liberal writers might be piling it on, or at least trying to influence some voters.
Jean finds that laughable.
“I’d like to take credit for being adventuresome, but I think we’re expressing a viewpoint 69 percent of the country agrees with,” he says. He also points out that Simpson episodes are written and produced a year in advance.
If nothing else, the publicity surrounding the episode is bound to ensure lots of viewers. And that, after all, is the bottom line in broadcasting. Ratings. Advertising. Money. It’s something Rupert Murdoch understands very well.

We’re talking about a truly atrocious headline. But while we’re on the subject, should I be offended because I was never groped by a priest when I was a kid? Maybe I was an ugly child. Maybe I didn’t put out the right vibes. Maybe it’s this big, honking nose. I feel so overlooked. As far as I can remember, I never even had a teacher who touched me inappropriately. You can be honest with me, people. Is it because I looked like Blossom?

I don’t have enough information to attack the Catholic faith and the hidden tradition of child abuse. Most of you know I have no real stance on religion or athiesm at all. I just dig this headline. And I still wonder why I was never touched.

Why are all things related to the male genitalia funny? Seriously, we’ve been giggling every time someone says “wood” or “stiff” since we were ten years old. And we still giggle. The evolution of man has been amazing and yet the reproductive organ is just hilarious. If it continues to be hilarious after four hours, consult your doctor or a prostitute.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A retired handyman who sued over a penile implant that won’t remain in the down position will receive a $400,000 judgment after all, according to a state Supreme Court order.
Charles Lennon, 68, is expected to get a total of $950,000, with interest included, because of the Dura-II penile implant, which he says has been causing him pain and embarrassment for a decade. “I’m just glad it’s over. It’s been a pain,” Lennon said of the legal battle with the implant manufacturer, Dacomed Corp., and its insurance company. “These guys have been insulting me, embarrassing me, treating me like a dog. The only way they can say they are sorry is by paying. That’s the only way you can hurt guys like that.”

This is me in a few years. I’m telling you people, mannequins are hot.

FERNDALE, Mich. (AP) — A Detroit man with a history of smashing store windows to grab female mannequins has been accused of indulging his fetish again. Ronald A. Dotson, 39, was arrested and jailed Oct. 9 after breaking a window at a cleaning-supply company to get at a mannequin in a black and white French maid’s uniform, police said.
A judge Thursday ordered him to undergo a psychiatric examination to determine whether he is competent to stand trial on charges of attempted breaking and entering. “Mr. Dotson went to prison and they haven’t helped him,” said
his lawyer, Edward Cohn. “He got out of prison and he was right back out there. It’s pretty bizarre.”
Dotson had been out of prison for less than a week when he was caught. His erotic pursuit of mannequins over the past 13 years has led to at least six convictions for breaking and entering and a stint in prison, police said. “He told his parole officer he was going to buy a mannequin so he didn’t have to do these break-ins anymore,” said Detective Brendan Moore said. “Apparently that didn’t work out.”

Now, I know we’ve been down this path before. But my friends, this has been a dream of mine since I was a boy gazing lustily at the girls locker room door back in high school gym class. Oh, the sky’s the limit with the awesome power of invisibility. What to do and where to go? And I ask these questions purely out of journalistic curiosity. I mean to use these powers for good rather than for the sake of pure libido. For the most part.