Facebook Time

I spent all my post-meeting time on Facebook tagging and editing photos that really didn't come out all that great. What's the deal with that? Sometimes, every single picture I take is phenomenal. Other times, every one of them is blurry and looks like crap. Tonight's photos fall into that latter bunch.

I've eaten up my late-night time on posting photos, so I don't know how much I have left in me to actually post something worth reading (or writing, for that matter). I can't say that the effort and energy expended on uploading and tagging wasn't worth it. It was, after all, for a very good cause: to celebrate the second year of sobriety for one of the greatest people I know, one of the people I consider to be a member of my family of choice (ya know - those people to whom you feel as close as you do to your own family, sometimes even closer). It was an honor and a privilege to share the late afternoon and evening with Meg and Angie, Sarah and Alex... the list continues exponentially. I'd like to start another gratitude list, but I feel like there will be those who will argue over their placements in the order of things no matter where their names may fall. Instead, I'll just leave this at the fact that I'm overwhelmed with joy at knowing these people and having them as parts of my life.

Moving on...

I believe that I owe The Shining more credit than I gave it in the final days in which I was finishing it.

I just ran downstairs to grab the remnants of my chow from El Compadre, scarfed it down, then got down to pray and complete my daily tenth step. I'm basically ready for bed, but I figured I'd type a while until total delirium sets in, and I have to push my laptop over to my nightstand and pull on my eye mask to blot out the infrared ultraviolet violent rays that intrude on my sleeping space every morning (I could never work the night shift and sleep in this room).

What impresses me most from the book, following what is basically my third reading (each from VERY different periods in my life), is that the horror of what is transpiring at the Overlook and among the members of the Torrence family still holds even for a jaded horror fan at the age of thirty-four. When reading the story, when suspending any sense of disbelief and just allowing yourself to become immersed in the story, the things that are happening are truly creepy.

Having done a lot of methamphetamine during my early twenties, I remember there were dark periods where I'd been up for several days and concocted all sorts of diabolical ideologies in my head. I now know that those brain-borne conspiracies and the combination hallucinations taking place simultaneously, were resulting from methamphetamine-induced psychosis. I also remember watching a film in the latter part of those days called The Salton Sea, in which everything I was ever afraid of was the reality for the characters in the film. What if those hallucinations and conspiracies hadn't been the results of a combination of speed and lack of sleep? What if everything that I know now was just a very overactive imagination was not only my reality at the time, but the true reality of the moment? That's what happened to me while reading The Shining this go-round. I really found myself looking over my shoulder, turning lights back on, and getting out of bed to check to be sure that my bedroom door was not only closed, but clicked totally shut. In other words, I was creeped.

What's not to find scary? There's a troubled family reeling from the father's tenuous grasp on fresh sobriety and the knowledge of a horrible incident that haunts them from their past. There's a big, old hotel with a massive history of bad people doing bad things there for the duration of its existence. There's a boiler in the basement that has to be checked and de-pressurized at least twice a day. There's a scrapbook found within the hotel's boxes of receipts and old records, and it details the story of the Overlook through the twentieth century. There's a little boy with a very keen power that all of us possess to some degree, but the boy has honed to perfection. There's visions of something terrible waiting to happen (REDRUM). There's a major snowstorm coming to isolate the family away from civilization, cut off from all contact with the outside world. There's animals cut into the topiary gardens guarding the front doors (and they sometimes seem to change positions when your back is turned). There's something so horrible that it defies explanation lurking in the concrete rings within the playground. There's a woman in the bathtub in one of the rooms, possibly the spirit of the jilted lady who cut her wrists in Room 217 some years before. There's Tony, Danny's friend who sometimes comes to tell the little boy about things that are going to happen, some of them good and some of them bad. There's Tony who is showing Danny all sorts of bad things about the hotel and about his father. And then there's Tony who stops coming around all-together. There's an elevator that is constantly springing to life and showing up on different floors with signs of a party taking place somewhere in the hotel. There's Jack Torrence, slowly slipping away from reality, succumbing to the wiles of the Overlook, and soon to be drinking the "bad stuff" that turns him into a totally different person. There's a dude in a dog costume hanging outside the caretakers' apartment, engaging in some sort of weird sexual pursuit of another hotel guest. And there's the bar that's suddenly fully stocked and a mallet for the roque court that is soon to be used for something other than the game played on the grounds. What's not to find scary?

I'm grateful to have taken the opportunity to re-read this work, and I'm looking forward to continuing to read and to see where the master of the twentieth century horror novel takes me next.