I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters lately.
Like, the other night when I opened the backdoor to take a load out to the compost, a thing I do most evenings after supper. I took two steps out and ran back in again, slamming the door behind me. The air tastes yellow. So now I get to add a new item to the list of 2020 lifestyle changes: wear a mask just to take the damn trash out.
Maybe you know by now that millions of acres of Oregon are on fire, and for days we’ve been living inside smoke. When I wake up in the morning, the sky is dull. Mid-day I see red sun spots kaleidoscoping across the living room carpet, the red orb in the sky outside letting us know it's still there. I’ve stopped texting friends to ask is there smoke by you because the answer is yes, everywhere is smoke. It smelled like a campfire at first, but then the smell changed to something more acrid. The smell of tires. The smell of loss. The smell of utter devastation.
There are no normal sounds either: I can’t hear my neighbor watching TV in a language I don’t understand, the elderly couple isn’t out across the street shearing down out-of-place blades on their perfect velvet lawn. There are no birds chirping. No voices. Just smoke — this faceless monster. My phone is filled with pictures of it. Trees obscured. The roof across the street behind a cloud. Why am I taking these photos? Do I really want to remember this?
Once I had a mask on my face, I walked into the fog with my bag of vegetable peels and eggshells, and was reminded of one of my favorite video game franchises of all time: Silent Hill. The game was like a nightmare, and I, for one, have always cherished — in a strange way — the monsters my mind creates in its sleep state. If you’ve never played Silent Hill 2, it’s basically running around in dark fog — your player’s view a single flashlight beam — through abandoned streets and the bloodied hallways of a long-abandoned asylum. Even inside, there is fog. It’s as much of a character of anything else in the game. Unlike games where you can meticulously plan your attack through the scope of a sniper rifle, in Silent Hill you could never really predict when a monster would lurch your way. Bloodied arms reach from nowhere. Maimed nurses with twisted, grotesque faces jerk and stumble down hallways, slicing at the air with knives. Freakish creations of arms and legs scramble your way like spiders. And then, there’s my favorite beast: Pyramid Head.
Pyramid Head, when I first saw him, if he’s a him, was the best monster I’d ever seen — strange and hypnotic, real and otherworldly, a creation that could only be borne of nightmare. Pyramid Head has a barrel-chested bodybuilders frame, and wears a long bloodied butcher’s smock. But over his head is a mask — though I’ll admit mask isn’t really the right word for it. More like a hulking metal executioner’s hood. He is blinded by it. You get the sense that he’s suffering, lugging this hunk of lead around on his shoulders, never to be freed. And if that isn’t enough, behind him, always, he drags a cartoonishly large cleaver, dripping with blood — a piece of weaponry so large, it’s really no wonder he’s so ripped. And if you can get past the fact that he seems to only live for your demise, Pyramid Head takes on this sort of addled state, dragging himself forward, struggling with these twin burdens. I think I loved him as a monster so much because it felt like he was created by a person who has also vivid nightmares. I’ve always been a very active dreamer, but of course nightmares are the ones I remember. I’ve known people who have night terrors and other awful things, but that’s not me. My mind just goes dark sometimes at night.
Life, lately, feels a bit like a real-life Silent Hill game — where we’re all waiting for the next arm to yank us into the fog and drop us at the feet of an executioner. My patience is frayed. My anger — a thing I prized when I was young and nurtured like a gift — is always tempting to get the best of me. I have no patience left, and there’s a monster always tempting me to give into the worst parts of myself. Is this the day that sticks out from the pandemic blur because I threw a coffee cup at the wall? Is this the day I lash out at a person I love? Is this the day I lose my mind? Is this the beginning, the middle or the end of my own demise?
One thing has become clear to me in the last six months of the pandemic (six months? Seven months? I guess it doesn’t really matter): at every turn there is a new temptation to be the worst version of myself. A monster. And why not? We are experiencing a pandemic that our President knew would kill us, but failed to act upon. Black mothers are in the streets telling us their babies are being murdered by police that act like tactical kill robots, but people point, instead, to broken windows and call that tragic. Truth is for sale. Our air is poisonous. We live under yellow skies. We always hoped we weren’t powerless, but of course now we know that’s an idea of dreams, not nightmares. And nightmares are a lot closer to reality that I guess most of us were willing to admit.
I’ve been staring out the window into the smoke and constructing a Pyramid Head origin story in my mind. I think about how someone had to lock that horrible metal mask onto him, and hand him that gigantic blade once it was on. In our minds we write ourselves into hero stories, but there are dark sides to us, too. I am me but I, too, am Pyramid Head, bloodied and broken, limping along under a crushing leaden reality that I can’t shake off, that I didn’t choose. And I think of that now whenever I take more than two steps from my door, in a mask to protect me from the air, in a mask to protect me from a virus. I didn’t create this hell for myself, but I have been having nightmares my whole life. And every time I have one, I’m never screaming to get out, to wake up.
Sometimes, in the middle of a nightmare, I’ll come out of it for just a second and think go back to sleep, this one is too crazy to not watch until the ending.
And I think that’s what I’m trying to do right now.
One more thing: watch this newsletter for a big announcement of a new project I’m launching on Monday. Lots of work. Hope you learn something from it. I sure have.