Accessible Monsters

October 10

Meg’s in town, as you astute readers know, and we’ve been having a lovely time, eating lots of good food, watching big waves smash on big rocks, renting classic movies (one of our mutual loves), reading to each other, taking walks, visiting San Francisco… I’m not getting any writing done, of course, but giving up productivity to get Meg is a more than fair trade. I get to hang out inside my head often enough—it’s nice to be so thoroughly embracing the outer world again…

In other news, Scott and I have found a place to live! For the past several weeks we’ve been sharing a room in the beautiful House on Maple Street, and while that’s not such a bad situation, it is a bit crowded, both in terms of personal space and house space. In a couple of weeks we’re moving… a few blocks farther down Maple Street. So I still get to live in The House on Maple Street, which means that my secret dream of turning my house into a rocket ship has not yet been dashed (that was a Chris Van Allsburg/Harris Burdick reference, for any of you who are bewildered)…

It’s a nice little house, and I’m looking forward to having room for all my books, and to buying a new desk (my present desk is improvised from lawn furniture and Scott’s nightstand). It’ll be good to have a room of my own… one I don’t feel guilty about cluttering up. Still, I’ll miss the murals and the balcony, though at the new place we have a pretty back garden, which I’m sure I’ll grow to love.

Pleasant surprise, today—I received a gift certificate for Bookshop Santa Cruz… given to me by my employers as thanks for the work I did at the National Trails Symposium. So I went out and bought the hardcover of Charles de Lint’s Forests of the Heart, which I’m pretty sure I’ll love. It has a gorgeous cover, too.

This weekend I went to the MOMA in San Francisco, with Meg and Scott. I loved it. I’m don’t embrace all modern art—though I can appreciate the thinking that led Rauschenberg to paint three panels white, looking at the blank triptych doesn’t move me, it sparks no reaction at all—unlike, say, the same artist’s magical goat-and-tire sculpture. Likewise I can intellectually appreciate experiments in color theory without wanting to look at 30 years worth of “Homages to the Square.” Still, I got to see some Magritte (though I missed the big exhibition they had of his work last month) and some odd self-portraits and some nice sculptures… and best of all, they had an exhibit called “The Darker Side of Playland,” some really twisted stuff full of childhood imagery. A leering Mickey Mouse. An enormous white dog on wheels, facing his far-too-small doghouse. A cartoon-mushroom-forest where the mushrooms have eyes and razor-sharp spines. Huge balloon anime heads. Great stuff.

My childhood was full of monsters and paranoia, like any child’s is, I guess. I feared what lurked under the bed, I feared what lived in the closet, I had rituals and rules and guidelines—if you keep your feet under the covers, nothing can get you, for example. And while my fear was genuine, it had another component: Fascination. I liked thinking about monsters, reading about them, even writing about them from the time I was ten years old or so. I liked the more disturbing sorts of fairy tales, the first novel I ever read was the first one Stephen King published, I snuck out of bed to watch Twilight Zone reruns. I’ve always mined my childhood for monsters and stories, and I often try to remember what it was like back then, believing that anything was possible, miraculous things (I once believed I could make the wind blow by climbing to a high place and calling it—perhaps that’s why I still dream so often of tornados), but also bad things, bad and fascinating things. I knew that if I walked over a sewer grate a slime-covered hand would reach out and grab my ankle. I knew that if I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I couldn’t open my eyes in the dark hallway, or I’d see something phosphorescent and ghastly. I woke more than once to see a ghost made of blue smoke drifting past my bedroom door. I found the Devil’s Stomping Ground in every patch of strangely bare earth, and the old men who looked at me from behind curtained windows lived desperate, nasty, secret lives.

Man, those days were great.

”The Darker Side of Playland” took me back to some of that, though of course all the exhibits had a knowing, adult-perspective feel about them. The sexually subversive nature of Barbie Dolls, things like that. I liked it a lot, though, overall.

Until next time… keep a night light burning.