Love the music...

Absence makes the haunt grow fonder....

I've been detained and away from the world for the last week, and as a result have returned with a mad jones for Halloween which is easily reflected in my flickr favs which swelled a good two pages more tonight alone while listening to HauntCast 18.

I know what I'll be catching up with Memorial Day weekend....



flickr

Halloween 2009

The government mandates the swine flu vaccine and soon the population is wiped out, only to rise again after death as cannibalistic mutant zombie pigs....

Halloween 2009

Until now, I haven't posted anything specifically of 2009. Apparently, I'm one of those people that step away and forget the holiday for a few months afterward-- like a half-year Halloween hangover.

Halloween 2009 was kind of a mess. The wind started pretty early Halloween morning when I started to set up. Unfortunately, setting up a day or two before is not an option in my neighborhood. Between teenaged vandals/thieves and the local buisy-body who's taken to calling the cops and zoning on his neighbors if there's even a scrap of something out of place or junky looking on your lawn, well, it would just be setting myself up for heartbreak. So, onwards and upwards we trudge through the 17+ hour day. Set things up, enjoy the 20 or so ToT's that come thru in the rain, try not to pummel the neighbors kid who insists on running through and trying to karate-kick my ghouls and then take it all down again in 50 degrees, wind and rain at midnight.
Not the best Halloween I've ever had. There was a good deal of stuff that couldn't go out because of the weather, and the outdoor lights proved not so outdoor worthy, so everything was left to bask in the glow of the candles that somehow withstood the weather. But other than that, and the horrible realization I'd be forced to make two trips to storage the next day to get it all out of my parents sight, I'd say it was worth it. :)

It's ALWAYS worth it.

Epithet Dreamer

I wrote a poem back in high school-- a bad one inevitably, as most semi-goth artsy fuck drama girls are known to have composed in high school. I think I wrote it in geometry class (another gem of a explanation behind the neverending flow of C's and F's in a variety of math and science classes and the A's in english. . .) The poem was probably a bordeline suicide notion, I can't remember how the hell it went, but the title always stuck with me, "epithet dreamer".

Haunters love their epithets and being a self-professed headstone addict, feeding freely on faux cement and marble markers come the Halloween season, I'm no different really. Last year I began dabbling in making my own gravestones, so I came up with quite a few. Ironicly the words would string themselevs together int hat daze between sleep and conciousness, as most ideas seem to. Post-it's and my the tiny notebook on my bedstand grew fat with them pretty quickly.

These are some of my favorites that made it into last years post-apocalyptic display, surving the wind and rain of a near wash-out night:

Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny, fickle mistress. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes it's completely out of control. I can be anywhere-- the most dangerously enlivening places for my grey matter seem to be seasonal sections in craft stores ('specially, round Halloween of course), greenhouses, book stores (book covers and magazines the big offenders) and then there's the big screen. Or more likely, my tiny 10 inch, now obsolete-ish (like most of the things in my stratosphere) Magnavox TV with the rickety pile of VCR, DVD player, and a few VHS favorites stacked on top-- 10 year old wax trails embedded on the screen and over the channel buttons so you can't push 'em and the star stickers and Pee Wee Herman pic stuck on with masking tape...

Inspiration is a vortex. You never know when or where it'll be, but inevitably you'll trip over the rug and fall in, head first. Suddenly you have this idea, and for me everything hinges on that one little notion. It becomes everything. The center of the universe... until the next one comes along. You have to hurry, it's a skittish thing, inspiration. And as inevitable as the idea and the newfound obsession for realizing it, you're guaranteed that when it strikes, more than likely, you will not have the time to nuture it as you feel it should. You have to work. You have five more projects scattered in piles around you, smoldering under a thin, transparent layer of neglect. You're never bored, but you're not getting anything done either. You write them down, try to focus and invest some semblance of time and effort into them so that one day they will be realized and unleashed unto the Earth as fabulously odd and shiny new as you envisioned it to be. The next thing you know you have little bits of paper tucked in everywhere with illegible scrawlings of greatness, pushed in notebooks, pockets or crushed in the bottom of your bag/purse until it's no better than paper pulp.

Oooooooh, paper pulp... *light bulb*

ACK! Goddamnit, ya see?

If you're lucky enough, these little notions may move on to the next step of being. The materials gather, but then you end up with plastic bags and boxes and piles dedicated to each idea, each project-- some overlapping so you don't have what you need for that zombie hand pen and have to go rifling through the dead body bin for the right kind of latex, or over to the half-finished mad scientist lab to find the moss green paint. It's maddening. Never ending.

And I wouldn't trade it for the world.

So, without further adieu, and the point of all this ranting, this years inspiration for Blackthorn Manor's 2010 Halloween Season:

(hello blog! nice to see you again)