Kurt Vonnegut, I am told, said that every writer writes for one person; in his case it was his sister. I don't know who I write for, I suspect that it is a group of people pretty close to my Multiply contacts list. Some of you are here and I am grateful.
I am humbled by some of the writers I encounter on Blogger; I wonder if I have the discipline to write often enough, and edit myself, so that I reach that level. Probably not, I can't even stop using semi-colons, which Vonnegut said were worse than useless.
So I will tell you a story. Until I was about 8 and my brother was 6 we shared a room in a tiny apartment that unbelievably still exists. We moved when my father got a job teaching and landed in a house, still not large, but with 3 bedrooms. My mother was pregnant at the time so the larger bedroom with crib would go to me, if the baby was a girl, and to my brother if the baby was a boy.
But having spent so long together, we often ended up in the same room, a practice my mother tried to discourage but failed. Our usual excuse was "bad dream" which my mother accepted, figuring the alternative was a crying child outside the master bedroom. The baby, a girl, was born and the big bedroom with the crib went to me and the sleeping infant was enough to quiet my fears in the night.
All was well until "Twilight Zone". We were told not to watch "Twilight Zone", we were forbidden to watch "Twilight Zone", and every opportunity we got we watched "Twilight Zone". By that time we were 10 and 8 or 11 and 9 and my parents socialized with people across the street or next door and, times being what they were, they did not hire a sitter, but simply told us to go to bed at 8 and come get them if need be. They might not even have locked the door.
Clutching each other in an ecstasy of terror we watched the episode with the guy with 3 eyes, the episode with the bulging headed spacemen whose mission was To Serve Man, and the little girl who fell out of her bed into the 4th dimension. And so on. Afterwards, we turned off the TV so it wouldn't be warm when my parents came home, and went to bed.
To dream. In the end that ratted us out. Bad dreams every Thursday (I think) night. Or every Thursday night that my parents were playing bridge with the neighborhood group. So this time they meant it, really meant it, and Rod Serling was banished from our house for some time.
Funny thing is, the show is still scary. I've watched it on old time TV channels and those episodes, some of them, are scary. Rod Serling all by himself is scary. There are lots of scary things in the world, war, disease, loss, guilt, but they are scary in a different way. Or, in the alternative, maybe "The Twilight Zone" was scary because it captured the essence of human fears, real fears, in the form of stories that could be dismissed as "science fiction" except that the dark side of human nature that Serling exposed is still around. And still fairly terrifying.
Ex-Catholic schoolgirl that I am, I want to make a happy ending. Hard to do with what is on the news. The only comfort I can offer is this: cherish the good dreams, let go of the bad dreams and hold each other tight.
I also love semi-colons. They are wonderful. :)
ReplyDeleteI couldn't (and didn't want to) watch anything scary as a child as it gave me horrible nightmares and I hated nightmares. Still do. Ten minutes of It gave me nightmares for a year, so I wowed to stay far away from horror.
Love Twilight Zone! I was more partial to the Outer Limits. You arent a blogger, you are a writer, a much better writer than you give yourself credit.
ReplyDeleteWe loved all those scary shows and ghost stories when we were kids. I know I saw those episodes you mentioned. My all-time favourite though was Alfred Hitchcock. I'll never forget the one about the Zippo lighter where a man bets the person who has the lighter that he can't light the lighter 10 times before it fails to light. When the lighter doesn't light the said number of times, the poor soul gets a finger cut off by the man. My brother and I played that game but without the finger-cutting. Hitchcock sure was sick, a genius or something.
ReplyDeleteI might do some exploring of Hitchcock. Genius, certainly, I don't know about the sick part, but there is something there.
DeleteI loved watching The Twilight Zone..watched all the scary stuff that was on back then around the same age. :) Loved the blog!!
ReplyDeleteI loved both The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but they din't arrive here until I was well into my teens. Yes, they had some scary stories, but not seeing them as a younger child they didn't trigger nightmares. There was a British TV show that did cause my nightmares as a child, though. it was called Doctor Who. A show that started in the early 1960's, always well-written stories, but whose special-effects budget was virtually zero, but still had lots of things to scare a young child, none more so than the The Daleks, the time-travelling Doctor's chief nemesis race, whose appearance on screen would send this impressionable youngster running to hide behind the sofa, to watch with eyes peeping over the top edge, ready to duck at really scary moments. After an absence of 15 years, the BBC revived the show in 2004 and it has been a huge hit, appealing both to the generation who watched from behind the sofa in the 60' and today's generation in equal measures. The modern version is everything we always wished the original could be....both well-written AND good effects. And it can still be scary. The episode 'Blink' , from the third season of the revived show, is a classic scary story.
ReplyDeleteBritish scifi, from Dr. Who to Torchwood, doesn't indeed have special effects, but more than makes up for it with stunning writing and acting. And, then, there is John Barrowman (hope I got that right) who I would pay to see read the phone book.
DeleteI will see if I can scare up "Blink" to watch.
I have never liked to watch scary movies, read scary stories, either. What has happened in the world and is still happening is enough scary. By contrast, I admit it may sound childish, I still enjoy reading fairy tales... Silly of me? Perhaps but it's good when we can soften, even if momentarily, the dark reality...
ReplyDeleteYou really write beautifully (but, then again, I'm fond of semi-colons, which might explain my reaction).
ReplyDeleteI thank everyone for taking the time to read and comment. With the exception of a few episodes, the TZ offered an unflinching look into the darker side of human nature and, I think, presupposed an indifferent, unforgiving, or sometimes evil, universe.
ReplyDeleteSerling and his writers (some of the greats in the SF genre) were not optimists in terms of humans or aliens. Then, again, as Belita said, what is happening in the world is pretty scary. Maybe they were realists. Ugh.
I do prefer fairy tales to scary stories too, but I do remember watching "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock and my mother dancing around the room with us to cheer us up before bedtime afterwards "just a story , just a silly story....." she would sing.......must admit, every time I see a lot of birds silhouette on a tree against the sky, I remember ......... maybe that is why I am an amateur bird rescuer , to get forgiveness ?
ReplyDelete"The Birds" was one scary movie. I saw it in a theater and to this day, when I see flocks of birds, as we do here in the autumn, migrating south, I think of it. You are so kind to rescue birds but I think you do not need forgiveness.
Delete