The mission is to bring together all of my endeavors into one, cohesive hub encompassing music, photography, writing, and creativity, in general.

In the meantime, this temporary setup will have to suffice.

Sorry for the delay and poor netiquette. I hope we see each other again.

PHASE ONE – CRAZY LAUGH

In any given adverse situation, I like to start with an off-putting or even maniacal laugh, which has the occasional advantage of intimidating (or even DESTROYING) adversity outright. More on that later. The important thing to remember is that putting all the “crazy” you can into it is very, very important. Employing the phase one or “Crazy Laugh” is equivalent to going “over the top” in the time-honored sport of arm wrestling. The idea is to give one great, big push to position yourself with the proper leverage against the opposing force. Namely, adversity.

You’re probably skeptical at this point. Good for you. A keen analytical mind is an essential survival tool. Stupid people die stupid deaths all the time. Some of them even win awards for it.  But not you. So, to satisfy your hunger for evidence to support this claim, I will describe for you the proper application of this technique in an adverse situation. Take, for example, stepping in a bear trap that partially severs your leg. This is a fairly serious bit of adversity by any standard but not too serious, as I will demonstrate.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re enjoying a leisurely walk through bear country when, perhaps distracted by the sighting  of a rare or endangered bird, you unwittingly step in a big, rusty bear trap. You have two choices in this situation. You could cry like an 8-year old girl with a fishing lure stuck in her neck (which will do little to help your situation, let alone your pride) or you can take a moment to calmly assess the situation, look directly at the bear trap and then burst into shrieking laughter with enough force and vigor as to virtually shred your vocal cords (Note: be sure to stop short of that, as there are other phases of laughter to follow).

Reach down into the depths of your bowels and muster a laugh so intense–so disturbingly hysterical–that IMMEDIATELY the situation takes on an entirely different tenor. What was mere seconds before a horrific bit of bad luck is instantly transformed into, at best, a somewhat messy pratfall. Do this and you will send a clear message to the bear trap and your mangled leg that this “rookie shit” is not nearly enough to dampen your formidable spirits. In a word: leverage. In fact, experts in this technique have managed to generate enough leverage using Crazy Laugh that bear traps will actually spring open and leg wounds will spontaneously heal.

DISCLAIMER: that level of ferocious optimism takes DECADES of disciplined practice to achieve. You ain’t there yet. Stay focused.

NOW, assuming you’re not one of the indomitable Masters of Crazy Laugh described above, what you need to do is move to the next phase. Once you’ve applied enough Crazy Laugh to establish dominance, you can then transition to a less off-putting, more bemused laugh, which we’ll call Ironic Laugh.

PHASE TWO – IRONIC LAUGH

Ironic Laugh tells adversity that, while you recognize and acknowledge its effect on your deal, you still have enough control over yourself to appreciate the humor of the situation. This belittles adversity and causes it to doubt itself. Apply Ironic Laugh liberally, gesturing toward the adverse situation as if inviting others to join in your amusement. You can even begin to ad lib a few phrases. Like, “Hahaha, boy, can you believe BEAR TRAPS? I mean, is it really necessary that they nearly SEVER the limb? I mean, it’s a bear TRAP not a bear MAIM, right? I thought the idea would be just to keep the bear from leaving! Seems like a major design flaw to me. Probably could have gone with an adhesive-based system! Anyway, I’m bleeding a lot. Hahaha. Geez…”

By this time, if you’ve applied the techniques properly, adversity is really becoming uncomfortable.

PHASE THREE – VICTORY/TAUNTING LAUGH

The third and final phase is the laugh of genuine amusement. Let’s call it the Victory Laugh (or Taunting Laugh). You can use this to handle smaller adverse situations, like dropping a lit cigar on your exposed genitals. Or, continuing with our example, you can use Victory Laugh after successfully completing the first two phases. As time goes by and your heartbeat begins to slow, and maybe you’re a little chilly from blood loss, the laugh transitions from irony to genuine amusement and maybe even flat out giddiness. This is a proclamation of the euphoric joy of victory. Soon enough your destroyed limb won’t matter at all. Adversity will shrink away, defeated and shamed, while you drift off to a comforting sleep.

I hope you find this useful. The key to perfection is persistence, so keep at it. Remember: adversity is out there and it’s trying to kill you. If you’re going to die anyway, you may as well die laughing.

Anyway.

SORRY ABOUT:

• Broken links
• Bad design (the bullets are stars? really???)
• Piss poor, sporadic entries
• That smell (wasn’t me)

DOING ABOUT IT:

• Feeling guilty
• Eating my shame
• Resolving to do better
• Having a good think on what this shite, er, site is going to be all about. And I’m leaning toward creativity (here’s where you have a nice, ironic laugh).

First, I really want to fix the way it all looks. If it looks good, I’ll be motivated to visit. Superficial bastard that I am.

I’ll give you a holler when I’m ready to roll again. Cheers.

Originally, the plan was to cut the Blogger stuff loose and start over. Upon doing so, it became apparent that leaving old posts on a blogspot address wasn’t going to solve my one problem: preserving links to images and other files which are hosted on my site. Blogger and WordPress handle those things differently, so basically the links that Blogger made don’t make sense to WordPress. I’m sure there’s some other technical crap involved, too, but I honestly don’t care. The point is, once it was clear that leaving the stuff on Blogger wasn’t going to fix this I figured I may as well bring the stuff along with me.

A bunch of posts didn’t make the cut. A few more will probably be culled in the next few days. Looking back, a lot of the things I wrote give me douchebumps now. Anything causing that reaction is getting deleted. It’s better for both of us.

It’s going to take a few for me to get things set up and looking the way I want them, so it’s going to be ugly around here a while. Sorry about that.

If your feed’s messed up, sorry about that, too. I’m trying to straighten it out with Feedburner as soon as possible.

1. Hosting my site through Blogger and going through a bunch of technical ballyhoo to get things like images working
2. Migrating my existing blogs to WordPress…and going through a bunch of technical ballyhoo to get things like images working
3. Cutting the old blog loose and making a fresh start here at WordPress, essentially leaving my old blog in stasis at the Blogspot address and forwarding my domain to this new dealie

Option 3 is the most attractive, of course, because I am reluctant to involve myself in technical ballyhoo. Also, I am lazy. Not to mention the fact that a fresh start might do me some good. The old digs have been feeling a little, well, old lately. I’m a guy who likes to change things around every now and again.

Off I go.

Rather than spend the whole post bitching about what my haunt wasn’t, I thought I’d share some pictures of what it was.

Here’s a bunch of photos (what I managed to get before the rain kicked in).

My aim this year was to go for a darker, more atmosphere-focused haunt. I spent less time on monsters and more time on things like candles, lanterns and pumpkins. The larger props were crude wooden tripods with skulls and other good stuff hanging from them. Lighting was kept to a minimum. The hope was that most everything would be lit from the fire bowl and about 30 different lanterns and candles and stuff.

You can’t really tell from the photos, but the skulls are marked with runes and arcane symbols. I wanted to create the sense that these objects were warnings to anyone wandering past. The layout was such that the trick-or-treaters were led up the driveway to where the props got more dense as they approached the garage. The idea was to make the “warnings” more ominous the closer you got to the goods.

I’d offer you photos of the whole “stage” but, as I mentioned, the rain really revved up before I could switch to my wide angle lens and finish shooting. Oh, well. Next year I’ll have to come up with a better sacrifice for the weather gods, I guess.

Speaking of next year, I’m going in an entirely different direction. Wish me luck.

HOW TO MAKE A KICKASS HALLOWEEN:
Start with a pumpkin carving party that had so much Halloween mojo (thanks mostly to my amazing wife and parents) that a little monsoon rain couldn’t stop some 40-odd (and I DO mean odd) people from coming up to set the back yard aglow with Jack O’Lanterns of every kind.

Add a special visit from my good friends Pumpkinrot and bean, who I finally got to meet after literally years of correspondence, blog posts, collaboration and general warm fuzziness. And you know what? They are the real deal. Kind, generous, wonderful and thoughtful folks. They didn’t even get freaked out when I got us all lost and it was starting to look like that scene from that horror movie. Either that means they knew they could take me or that they’re just that cool. I’m going with ‘just that cool’.

Then top it all off with a return to HAUNTED OVERLOAD in Lee, NH. But, this time, let’s really do it in style. Let’s pile Pumpkinrot, bean and BOY into a car driven by Yours Truly and send them on a road trip for a VIP tour of Haunted Overload, courtesy of owner Eric Lowther. Yeah. Let’s.

HAUNTED OVERLOAD 2009
Ladies and gentlemen, you know me. You know my tendency for hyperbole. You know I tend to get overly excited about things. Let me be clear: as excitable as I might be, I haven’t the ability to exaggerate the awesomeness that is Haunted Overload. No matter how much I tell you how good this place is, my description (and my photographs, for that matter) will fail to match what you will experience if you actually go and see it for yourself. Better still, if you’re fortunate enough to talk with Eric and the Haunted Overload cast and crew, you will begin understand the amount of love and effort that goes into this event.

There are many things I could tell you about the magnificent props, the acres of Jack O’Lanterns, the field of corn that is planted and grown specifically for Haunted Overload by Eric himself every year, and many other things that set Haunted Overload apart. What I really want to tell you, though, is how taken I was by the people who bring it all to life.

The cast, the crew, the nice ladies at the ticket booth and Eric himself: they all LOVE being a part of this thing. There are many impressive things about Haunted Overload but this is the most impressive thing to me. Every single conversation I had or overheard was infused with a very real passion. There is a sense of family, as hokey as that might sound. It’s a bunch of friendly, talented, motivated folks drawn together by a common love for Halloween to turn a patch of empty field into a creepy fantasy world. While it’s clear that Eric is the creative force behind this overgrown haunt–and that he apparently does not sleep from September to January–he has a lot of help from great folks who are fully invested in making Haunted Overload a success. The result is a really fucking killer show.

No lover of Halloween with access to a reliable form of transportation should miss this event. Period.

Thank you to Eric for the invitation and tour. You’ve really made something special. Thanks to the cast and crew of Haunted Overload. You’ve helped to make something special even more special. Bravo.

Thanks to you for reading. You can check out my photos of Haunted Overload here.

Thanks again, Johnny! That is really damn cool of you.

On a related note, for anyone who likes my music and wants more of it, I’m going to start writing and recording again after Halloween. People seem to be digging the bits and pieces I’ve released so far, which tells me it’s probably a good idea to get off my butt and get to work. 2010 should bring more creepy goodness.

Forgive me if that sounds a little vague but that is by design. I know myself well enough to realize how terrible I am at keeping commitments. I actually want this to happen, so my official statement is “I’ll be working on more stuff soon” with a wink and a nod. You can take said wink and nod as signifying my secret determination. I just can’t come right out and say something like “AN ALBUM-LENGTH RECORDING BY HALLOWEEN 2010 IS GUARANTEED!” because, well, you’ll never see it. I basically have to trick myself into doing it. It’s sick. I’m not right in the head.

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

Cesare Pavese

This made me think of how slight hearing loss has affected my balance (when I lay my head down at certain angles or when doing things like working underneath a car, I sometimes get a touch of vertigo and have to adapt). Then it made me think of that dizziness as a metaphor, and I found myself thinking about how familiar environments–while comforting–can be stifling, and how changing environments alter our perceptions. Or perhaps clear them.

The world is a big place relative to the one in my head, which is remarkable given the size of that one. I’m not bragging. Imagination is a big place.

I found this quote here. Along with other things you might like to see.